We are delighted with our new Camera Nestbox – a Blue Tit has been busy pecking at the entrance hole and we wait with anticipation of a nest being built inside it soon. The lighting by natural daylight is working well – most of the day I see inside in colour and only when it is very dark, with rain, does the picture on my PC screen show it in greyer tones. It is also possible to see inside this Nestbox via a Television. I wonder how much longer it will be before nest building begins.
My Camera Nest box, shown above at 8.22am, is sited on my house wall facing North/East and only gets full sun first thing in the morning. I did wonder if this location would give enough light through the holes in the roof but they are clearly doing their job very well. It also gets light through the entrance hole itself and I now think the flickering, I see in my PC screen, is in fact the Blue Tit at the entrance and not on the roof as I first suspected. I have been able to see this in action!
Nestbox location – ideally I would like to have sited ours on a mature tree but this is not always possible in a smaller garden. Our Nestbox, shown above, is a cable one with connectors coming out of the bottom see here. We have chosen to add a box to encase our connectors to give them the extra protection they are likely to need against the elements they may face in our part of Scotland – rain, sleet, snow and cold temperatures. It is a tidy well constructed Nestbox as you can see. Our cable comes out through a small hole, on the RHS of the bottom of the box and heads horizontally out to the corner of the house wall. The cable then goes round until it meets our down pipe following it down to the point in the wall where we entered the house.
Just in time – if you are considering putting up a Nestbox, here in the UK, then you really should consider it very soon as I suspect the birds are out searching for suitable nesting locations right now. It was this time last year that we put our first box up and we were amazed at how quickly the birds found it.
The photograph, shown above, was taken in my garden on March 8th 2007.