Sad news about our chicks… Over the last five days all our chicks have died one by one.
Who knows the reason for sure, maybe one of the parents died, maybe the birds didn’t time laying their eggs to match the caterpillar season right or something else but that’s nature and we have a had a great couple of years before this year. Let hope birdcam 2012 will be more successful
We have finally managed to get our bird box with a live feed. The feed should be running 24 hours a day for the next couple of weeks, or until the chicks have flown the nest (fledged).
In this video mum is sitting on the nest with the chicks underneath her when dad comes in with some delicious looking caterpillars! Mum makes way for dad to feed some of the chicks before flying back out for more food.
At the moment it is a constant feeding frenzy in the bird box with both parents flying in and out to bring back caterpillars for their chicks.
When they first hatched we counted 8 beaks (out of 9 eggs) but with so many growing bodies and beaks it’s now difficult to tell how many we have!
The chicks are now 6 days old and as you can see they have grown an enormous amount in those 6 days since they were born!
Sorry for the lack of updates but due to technical issues with our e-mail we are having huge problems getting the videos of our chicks
In this video you will see Mr tit bringing in food for Mrs Tit. Mrs Tit attempts to feed it to her chicks but they are so newly hatched that it’s all a bit too much!
You will then see Mrs tit is giving her other chicks a helping hand out of their eggs. Look closely and you will see her tapping the eggs and eating the eggshells that her chicks are hatching out from.
If you look carefully you will also catch glimpse’s of her newly born chicks.
See Mrs Blue tit all snuggled up in her feathery nest before getting up, having a stretch and going for a quick fly break outside.
As she gets up you will see her 9 eggs in all their glory.!
Mrs tit is spending more and more time in our nest box now and Mr Tit has started to feed her whilst she sits on the eggs.
We now have 4 eggs! After the boiling hot day we’ve had Mrs Tit left her eggs uncovered today. We know from previous years that once blue tits start to lay their eggs they will lay 1 egg per day. This year Mrs Tit has been keeping all her eggs totally covered up which has made getting a video quite difficult.
Maybe she has left them uncovered to give us an easter egg treat! 
)
Mrs Blue tit has provided us with the first egg of the 2011 season!
But you have to be quick because she is very good at hiding it!
This is the first video from this morning, taken at 6.25am as she left the nest from her overnight stay and you can clearly see the egg but she’s had it covered for the rest of the day
We are getting on average an email every 2 minutes and have over 5,000 emails in our birdcam folder!!
Firstly sorry for the lack of updates at my end. I’ve been so busy at work that updates for bird-cam.co.uk have been put on the back burner.
Anyway here is an update today and in the video below you can see Mrs Blue Tit bring in nesting material and then flapping it down to compact it.
Bird cam 2011 is looking good! We are getting regular visits to our bird box and those visits are getting more frequent and longer. The female blue tit is now displaying nesting behaviour inside our bird box. (see our video below).
Mrs Tit is visiting many times each day and fluttering her wings inside the nest box which is what she does to flatten down the nesting material that she will bring in to make her nest. All signs are positive and after looking up what has happened in previous years to our bird box, we would expect that the nest building will begin anytime in the next couple of weeks. The actual start date will depend on the green moth caterpillar season, which is what the blue tits align their egg laying to, as they rely on them to feed their chick. Fingers crossed!
Our 3 chicks fledged this morning. The first went around 7am with the remaining 2 following at approx 10am.
A reasonably sucessful year, not as good as last year, but much better than 2008!
Thanks for tuning in and we’ll be back in 2011. I will be rebuilding the server and trying to improve the camera definition.
