Nesting seems to be such hard work. Our Blue Tit pair definitely are definitely making it look it look that way anyway as they build a nest in our Camera Nestbox. The moss goes in. The moss gets shuffled about. The moss comes out. This process has been repeating all week. I would say it is fascinating to watch, we are lucky they have started at all, but we are finding it frustrating to see the nest look so lovely and neat for it to then to get wrecked.
One difference in the nest building process came when it was dark at 9.30pm on Thurs evening. We heard noises then singing/calling from our box for a while then noises that could have been our Blue Tit leaving again. When it went quiet we, from a distance, lit the entrance hole with a torch to see if we had our first night-time visitor but our box was empty. A flavour of a weeks hard work by the Blue Tits in our Camera Nestbox can be seen in the pictures below.
Last Saturday evening looked promising as you can see above but on Sunday morning the moss started to come out again. Just look how much it removed in one trip!
On Monday the top picture shows serious promise and by the end of the day the floor was covered with moss. On Tuesday at 8am the middle picture was captured then only one our later our nestbox was to be emptied again. Wednesday and Thursday saw some material go in and more out. At one point there was less material in the box than the top picture for Saturday.
On Friday at 10.30am the top picture shows promising progress once again and by 4.30pm we were hopeful. Material was still being removed but it seemed to roughly stay at this stage.
The nestbox shuffle, video 0:24 without background music, try 480p quality.
On Saturday just before 10am I captured the film above which shows the Blue Tit nesting shuffle in action which it has been doing all week. It finished the visit off as usual with removing some material again
The final picture below shows our Camera Nestbox as it was today at 12 noon. I wonder now if we will see any difference in another week – perhaps the female will have a sleep-over!
The video, shown above, was taken in my garden on April 7th 2007.
If you have enjoyed looking at this video you may like to see more – click on the link at the top of the right column where you will see further links direct to all videos published in previous posts.