Bluetit Diary    May 2012 (1)

 

 

Tuesday 1st May 2012

As I forecast first on 25th April, Jess's eggs have started hatching today!

At the start of the day, there was nothing to indicate that today was a special day.  However, James was being particularly active and was frequently feeding Jess, so perhaps in some mysterious way he sensed what was about to happen.

As usual, we switched on just before 8am and found that James was giving Jess some food.

A quarter of an hour later, he was back again with another feed.

By now, we were awake enough to put out some mealworms for the birds, so of course James took advantage of this to give Jess her third feed since 8 o'clock.

Nothing untoward happened over the next couple of hours, and then we suddenly saw that something unusual was going on - Jess had a piece of eggshell in her beak.

Her first egg must have hatched!

When, after nearly half an hour had passed, and Jess finally left the nest box, we could see the chick for ourselves.

One chick and eight unhatched eggs.

And it's hungry!

It was not long before Jess was back with something for the chick to eat.

James seemed to take some time before he realised what had happened.  It was about 3 hours later before he started to bring food for the newly hatched chick.

Once he realized it though, there was no stopping him.  He went into overdrive and repeatedly brought food for the chick.

Soon after, another chick hatched out.  Here is Jess extracting the egg shell from the nest cup. 

At this stage of the proceedings, female bluetits normally eat the eggshell when a chick hatches.  Later on, they fly out of the nest box with the eggshell, presumably to drop it some way from the site.

Another visit to the nest box with food by James ...

... and another!

At this stage it is easier to count unhatched eggs (ie 7) rather than pink blobs to see how many chicks there are.