Last year's birds
Fluff roosts
Fluff is usurped
A truly excellent informative site about these birds
David
Jones's
site with nesting Parus caeruleus, about 8 miles away
Visitors since 5th May 2000:
20th May 2000. The day started fine, and clouded over at about noon. Here are the chicks showing six out of seven beaks, ready for food. One of the more advanced chicks shakes the limb that will become a wing, and indulges in scratching its back with its lengthening beak in a preening movement, even though as yet it has no feathers.
The male is more circumspect than the female about depositing his full weight on the chicks. Here he is trying hard not to over-balance and fall on them.
Meanwhile, at nest box 2, the male arrives.
A patient wait of 35 minutes for the female to leave (it is a chilly afternoon) allows us to determine that there is a single unhatched egg in the second nest-box.
A loud robin-chitting noise is heard in the garage. With a ladder, a telephoto lens on the Mavica, and some patience, we see that there are two newly-fledged robins sheltering in the roof space, showing no inclination to leave.
Just to make sure that these really are juvenile robins (Erithacus rubecula), we consult a picture in the Field Guide 0-86272-139-3, which is an invaluable resource for identifying our garden birds.
Other pictures of the day's activities may be found by opening the .jpg files in the pics00520 directory listing.
At 9.30pm the female is perched on the pile of growing chicks, noticeably nearer the camera, and noticeably shaggier in the plumage than of late. She looks very uncomfortable and keeps moving around and readjusting her position. Last night the temperature excess in the nest-box thermometer reached 6.3 degrees Celsius.
21st May 2000 Sunday. There was 8mm rain in the gauge overnight. The day was sunny on the whole. Here is a picture of the bird with a caterpillar, taken from about 18 inches above the top of the nest-box looking straight down. The bird seems only slightly put off by the close proximity of the human.
Eight pictures were taken in this manner. Here is a view from the other side . We also observe the different colours of the two caterpillars. After this, the female made several trips, then spotting the human inside the upstairs room, she perched on the antenna wire and went through a prolonged flutter-feeding display with a big green caterpillar in her mouth. Is this "making friends with the camera-toting human"? The other bird was nowhere in sight.
23rd May 2000. It rained all afternoon, in a depressing and miserable manner. Sitting on the patio in the mizzling rain at about 8pm, the birds came and sat on the wire (there is an antenna wire and a telephone wire that they use as staging posts), and called to each other with a chirp followed by a chattering call - possibly a warning cry, as the human was only 3 metres from the nest-box entrance. Both birds offered each other little twitches of the wings, accompanied by a semi-jump.
The chicks are coming along well. They can see now, as they face the light from the nest box entrance when waiting for food. Here is a picture of a chick "back and wing feathers", where one can see the ridge of proto-feathers along the spine, and the developing flight feathers with contrasting white and dark bands.
Here, for (overly) good measure, are three pictures of mother and chicks.
And after much tidying up under the chicks, with her legs grabbing hold of the top of the nest cup (which is now very deep) and her head and body deep in the cup doing maintenance and who-knows-what under the chicks,
the mother sits down on the brood (she is larger apparently because she is closer to the camera), before tucking her head into her back feathers in the roosting position.
How does our bird manage to roost, covering all seven growing chicks? The nest cup has been widened out at the bottom so that some of the chicks sleep under the nest materials. Occasionally one sees the nest heave, as well as the sleeping mother.
There has emerged a true "pecking order" amongst the brood. The larger ones seem to get more than their fair share of caterpillars; perhaps the feeding parents think that larger offspring need to be fed more. In any case, two of the chicks are so small that they are trampled underfoot and underwing at the bottom of the nest, only emerging with their tiny mouths comparatively rarely. At one stage we thought that one must have died, as we did not see it for a couple of days. However, perhaps the adult birds make sure that the feeding never gets so unfair as to cause starvation. There are still seven, although two or three are dominant.
Unlike David Jones's family, the parents here seem to be bringing fewer loads of food, but larger consignments in each load. This also might explain why they feed the larger chicks more frequently; small beaks need small food.
There was only one feeding visit this evening accompanied by only two visits to the box, between 7.30pm and 8.30pm.
25th May 2000. There have been two cool and showery days, with 12.8mm rain in the rain gauge. The temperature differential between the nest box base thermometer and the outside air temperature reached 7.3 Celsius last night, with the seven sleeping nestlings and their mother on top of them. She has got the nest area nicely arranged so that they are all contained under her "floor plan", so she gets plenty of good sleep. This evening she has spent half an hour enlarging the nest cup so that it occupies nearly all the nest box floor area. The nestlings pull themselves up out of the cup, but they don't perch on the perimeter.
The male bird is a tower of strength, always arriving efficiently and speedily with food, and removing the detritus with commendable reliability. Two nights the female has stored "midnight poo offerings" on the nest surface, out of reach of the brood. They are promptly removed when it dawns. Loud cheeping noises are heard around the box when food appears. The nestlings seem to be more uniformly balanced in size and forewardness today; perhaps the birds have been differentially concentrating their feeding on the smallest. It is possible, we like to think, to identify characters amongst the offspring by their body language. One nestling has a habit of scratching itself furiously like a dog with a flea, using the right leg.
As we have five peanut feeders outside (which will not dispense large peanut pieces, for safety reasons) it is interesting to note that the parents do not make very much use of them. However, an adult robin, possibly responsible for the offspring in the picture above, has been trying to use a nut feeder. Robins are ground feeders and ill-adapted to this activity. The result is comical to watch, and not very effective for the robin. The peanut feeders are a useful resource for the brood of young starlings which has just fledged from the nest in the eaves of the house next door, and for a fierce looking brightly-coloured greater spotted woodpecker. There are also a collection of chaffinches and buntings at the seed table, courting magpies which make a great deal of noise, and a pair of doves.
email d.jefferies@surrey.ac.uk David Jefferies 25th May 2000
