Bluetit Diary    May 2009 (12)

 

 

Thursday 14th May, 2009

This, and the entry for Friday have not been easy to write.  One of Bella's chicks died some time before Thursday afternoon, but we didn't notice until Friday morning.  Using Replay, you can see that during Thursday, there are many more flies buzzing around than you normally see, so perhaps this chick died on Wednesday or even earlier!  Bella discovered it today (Thursday) and tried to remove it from the nest box, but failed.

Looking at the pictures taken early on Thursday, we can only find one with 8 beaks (or glimpses of beaks) showing.

Until the evening, the day seems like any other, but at a quarter past eight you can see Bella is up to something unusual.

She seems to be removing a dead chick from the nest cup.

She tries to take it out of the nest box, but it is too big for that.

She leaves it beneath the hole as she leaves the box for a short while.

On her return, she has another look at the dead chick.

She seems to be trying to pick it up again.

It is too much for her and she leaves it on the side of the nest cup beneath the nest box hole.

At the time, we were busy with other things and have only put this story together by looking at the picture record.

 

 

Friday 15th May, 2009

The following morning, the chick is still more or less where Bella had left it the night before.  At this stage, we still had not noticed anything amiss!

This picture, which was taken at 10:07am, was the last picture taken before the cameras were turned off.

Elizabeth noticed what had happened shortly before 10 o'clock, and we spent a little time examining the picture record to see what had happened in order to decide what, if anything, we should do about it.

We quickly came to the conclusion that the chicks would be more at risk if we left the dead chick in the box than if I removed it - and so I did just that.

The construction of the Boxwatch nest box makes this a simple and quick job and the chicks were too young to have any thought of danger - they just thought I had come to feed them!  This picture was taken at 10:09am after the chick had been removed.  The whole job had taken less than 2 minutes.

Within a couple of minutes of my finishing the job, Bella was back with some food for her chicks!  (This picture was taken at 10:10:59am!)

She continued feeding the chicks as normal for the rest of the day.

Success!!