This is the start of another year, a bit later than usual, but our birds have not started to think it is Spring yet! Last year we had one bluetit and one great tit nest - what will it be this year? Since Christmas, I have had both boxes down for their annual clean. Both have had their light bulb changed - I daren't think of the consequence of a blown light bulb mid season!
I still have some work to do. The outside camera for Box2, the box in the front garden, is badly positioned and I want to move it so that the pictures it takes are more or less face onto the front of the box. At the moment, it is still mounted on the garage wall which is where we had it before we moved the box in a hurry when the tree it was on blew down last January.
As there was nowhere firm enough to mount the camera in about the right place, I left
the camera where it was and just swung it round to point to the box's new location.
The result was that I got very few good external pictures last year. I hope this
year will be different.
I finally got this box back up and attached to my PC at about one o'clock. Half an hour later, Box2 had its first visitor - the bluetits in this corner of the garden have always been the keenest when it comes to inspecting a new bird box.
Well, that's what I thought at the time, but when I came to look at the outside camera's record I noticed that a bird had gone into the box several times during the morning before I had got the link to i-Catcher set up properly.
This year I have 6 cameras all attached to i-Catcher Console running on my PC. However, the i-Catcher development team have worked some magic to the system since I used it in earnest last June and it now runs with all six cameras taking pictures by the million and not even breaking into a sweat!
Well, now we can see that both boxes are being visited. The system captured a visit to Box1 this morning. We also had another rather illustrious visitor to our garden today, but more of that later.
At about 9.20 this morning a bluetit visited Box1. After our experiences last year, I have left the box's entrance hole at 32mm. It was originally 28mm in diameter just like Box2. However, this year it also has a steel protection plate over the area of the hole to stop a woodpecker or other predator from enlarging the hole to get at the chicks inside. This means that as well as bluetits, great tits, nuthatches and even sparrows can get inside.
So far, though, only this bluetit has shown any interest
When we saw this picture, we thought for a minute that the female was about to join the male inside the box. This is the typical posture the inside bird adopts when there is another outside on the entrance hole.
This time it didn't work out this way and the outside bird flew off again. Perhaps they haven't properly paired up yet.
"I thought you were coming in then!" he seems to be saying.
The normal pattern of events is that the male finds the possible nesting spot and, having checked it out, persuades the female to come inside and have a look. If she likes it, that seems to be it and the pair continue to spend time in and around the box until some time in March when the female decides that she had better get on with building the nest.
We had an usual visitor today. Here is a picture of a female blackcap feeding inside the fat block feeder at the bottom of our garden. We had visits last winter from both a male and a female blackcap and it's good to see a female again this year. Presumably nobody has told it that we are supposed to be getting a cold winter this year!