Apologies to all those who missed looking at our bluetits during the last week. As I was away, my computer was switched off. No computer, no webcam (and unfortunately, no record of what happened!).
So how many chicks do we have here in Box2? When I left, there were 11! This looks like only 8, but there could be more buried at the bottom of the nest.
If there are now only 8 chicks where did the other 3 chicks go to?
Only 8 chicks visible again here. Often you can only see less than this as well fed chicks sometimes get buried beneath the hungrier ones.
So how about Ann's chicks in Box1?
This picture is the first in a sequence showing how the parents share the food around fairly.
First she offers her food, in this case the usual green caterpillar, to the nearest chick.
If that one doesn't grab it quickly enough, she tries another chick,
In this case, that chick too was slow off the mark as well. Here you can see what looks like two caterpillars - it seems a good year for these this year!
Ann therefore tries a third chick . . .
. . . and then a fourth!
She has no luck there either, so she goes back to one of the chicks she had offered it to earlier.
This time it looks as though the chick has managed to take it . . .
. . . so Ann goes off for more!
This is a close-up picture of Ann's nest. You can clearly see that there are 9 chicks, so of the 11 eggs, 9 have lead to healthy chicks. Let's hope it leads to 9 chicks fledging!
Back to Bella's chicks in Box2, a chick is giving its newly feathered wings some exercise! This is probably not the first time it has done this, but as we weren't here to capture it, the presumed event has been missed.
You can only see 8 chicks again here. I suppose we must assume that something has happened to three of the 11 chicks visible on the 4th May. I wonder what happened to them?
If they had died, Bella will have removed their bodies from the nest box. We have observed this in earlier years and it is often a struggle to get the body out of the box.
Both Bella and Ben with their chicks.
The chicks are growing up fast! Some of them are leaving the nest cup and wandering about the bottom of the nest. Here the bird outside the nest cup on the left is a chick, not one of the parents"