Bluetit Diary    Feb 2011 (3)

This is Zoe, the female bluetit who has spent much of the day cleaning up the box.  She has been in and out  from the start of recording and was only interrupted by events outside her control, namely the fight between Harry and Will.

This is the same shot from above - and you can see how disgusting the box has become.

Zoe started to remove the odd pellet of poo at around a quarter to eight this morning.  Here she has just picked up a very small pellet and is about to fly out of the box with it.

A couple of hours later she gets down to it in earnest, starting to remove 2 or 3 pellets a minute in a regular cycle of flights in and out of the box.

By 11 o'clock, and after 15 minutes hard work, she had already made a noticeable improvement.

Here is Zoe leaving the box with yet another pellet.

When parent bluetits carry away their offspring's faecal sacs, they take them some way away from the nest before dropping them so as to  reduce the chance of leading a predator to their nest.  I expect that Zoe is also taking the pellets she removes well away from the nest box.

At this point Zoe's cleaning was stopped by Harry's reappearance on the scene.  We think that it is Will and Zoe who are the item and that Harry is still unattached.

Harry enters the box in his normal way by landing on the shelf.

He soon hops up onto the hole, perhaps to get in Zoe's way.

You can see it's Harry by his left hand tail feather which was damaged in an earlier fight with Will.

Seeing Harry interfering causes Will to get involved.  Here he and Harry are skirmishing on the entrance hole.

Very soon, Will went (or was dragged) inside the box and a major fight took place.

This battle was even more intense than their earlier fight in this box