Nesting season 2001
Broad Street, Guildford, UK.
Page seven.
18th May 2001. Friday. Between midnight and 1 am, two eggs hatched. This was evident from the two empty shells either side of the sleeping bird.
Sleeping bird between two eggshells
Later, in the afternoon, feeding was proceeding briskly, with views of the last two eggs, from time to time. Here is the eighth egg.
Eighth egg about to hatch
Where there are birds, and nests, there are feathers. Meanwhile, in the other nestbox our placid broody bird continues to sit, taking no notice of the camera which has temporarily replaced the roof of her home.
Broody bird in Box 2.
Back in Box 1, a crack appears in the eighth egg. The youngster is straining hard with beak and legs to separate the halves. No assistance is given by the other blind chicks, and the parents are food-gathering elsewhere.
Eighth egg cracks
The emerging youngster is successful in prising the shell apart, only for it to close up again under the tensile stress of the skin under the shell.
Egg apart
Within a couple of minutes, the powerful chick legs have separated the egg-halves and the legs and wings appear outside the shell, leaving the head stuck inside.
Climbing out of the shell
At this point the male arrives with food.
Male arrives flamboyantly
He attempts, gymnastically, to avoid landing on the chicks.
Male shows wings
He doesn't appear to notice the hatchling; he has an enormous caterpillar which is quite inappropriate for such small offspring. He spends a long time trying to find a young beak that will accept it. He has no purchase to tear it in half, and no teeth to bite it in half. The chicks have gaping mouths and throats, but they are still blind and have no beaks to grip with. It is truly a case of "all or nothing".
Enormous lunch offering.
Later on the female returns, cleans up the remains, and eats the eighth shell.
Eating the eighth shell.
She sits on the brood to keep them warm. The male brings food, and after a little while (10 minutes) he arrives and stays to watch her eating the nineth shell. The egg has hatched underneath her, with no assistance. That, then, is a complete clutch, safely delivered.
Eating the nineth shell, in company.
A satisfactory day's work over, the female resorts to her preening.
Interval while preening.
Preening the wing socket.
Meanwhile, the male brings food on a regular cycle. The food is gratefully accepted. If the female is absent, the male feeds the chicks himself. He is definitely competent. Both birds eat the poo sacks that the chicks are excreting; they are not large enough yet to need taking out of the nest.
The male passes food to the female
It is gratefully accepted.
The total interval between first and last hatching was about 24 hours. The female bird has a distinctive flight path, dropping from the nest box at 10 feet off the ground, to within two feet of the ground, before using the speed to gain altitude to clear the six foot fence on the way to her feeding grounds. Perhaps this is so that the exit path is speedy and unobtrusive, to avoid attracting predators. After the debacle on our previous page, we hesitate to make any more predictions.
There have been a few unwelcome avian visitors to the box, but now that the eggs are hatched, our birds pay scant attention to them, as they have no chance of getting through the 1-inch diameter nestbox entrance hole.
There are a pair of blackbirds in the front garden. The female is brown, and the male glossy black. They also flutter their wings at each other and gather worms, but we have been unable to trace where the nest is sited.
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There are many pictures of the kind of activity now proceeding, on the pages from earlier years. Please see the links on the page "Old birdsite" below.
Old birdsite http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/D.Jefferies/bird/birdsite.html
Lifeforms pictures http://www.eryptick.net/lifeforms.htm
Email dj@eryptick.net
diary continues......