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Space on this website has been made available to me by courtesy of the Leeds & Bradford Panel of Remap.

Mike .

Mike's Birdwatch - 2008

Latest update: 12th June 2008.

The bird box is located in a West Yorkshire suburban garden. Blue tits have successfully nested in a box at the same location for more than 25 years. The present box with the camera was first installed in 2006 and the link to the first website is HERE. The photos are limited to black and white because the camera takes infra-red images.

The camera was re-installed on the 2nd April 2008 and the bird's entrance to the box is at the top of the pictures.

The bird had already made a lot of progress building the nest before the camera was installed this year.

If progress follows the pattern of previous years, the eggs should start arriving around the end of April, hatching around the middle of May and fledging sometime during the first week in June.

The latest

“Loose a few and Win a few “

After my latest update yesterday [11.06.08], it became apparent the remaining chick had got a leg entangled in some of the nesting material. Against all the rules of ‘assisting nature’, we decided to open the box, release its leg and re-close it in the box. The chick then flew around in the box without problem. The mother returned to feed it and was obviously trying to encourage it to leave. However, when we checked this morning, the chick had died overnight. I have to say the chick was still very small compared to the one that did make and it is doubtful if it would have survived even if we had left the box open.

Meanwhile

I got an email from a friend this morning who had better luck. He reckons five or six of his fledged. He doesn’t have a camera in the box but he did get the couple of shots below

[11.06.08]

Somewhere between the 6^th and 9^th, another chick died leaving three of which one was definitely larger than the other two. The big one flew on the morning of the 10^th but one of the smaller ones died on the same morning. The remaining chick is still there and still being fed. On the face of it, the chick looks healthy enough and keeps exercising its wings but so did the other two and they were fully feathered. Just why some should die off at that late stage of their development is a bit of a mystery because all were being fed as far as I could see.