Not much action to report...

After some disturbingly quiet days, with nothing captured at the weekend, and only a brief glimpse of a Blue Tit perched on the hole at breakfast on Tuesday, I was starting to think we'd been abandoned. Plus, there is some serious Blue Tit activity in the ivy on the other side of the garden, and the box is just in front of the shed where the noisiest Blackbirds I've ever heard are getting to know each other. However, at 8:38am today, the camera caught a ten second inspection...

...so fingers crossed we are still on the shortlist.  Although I was not very pleased to see a fat bee exploring the premises...

...or his wasp friend a couple of hours later!


Still a week before the consensus nesting time starts, let's hope for the best!

Looking at the skylight

Later the same day...

...investigations have reached the roof.  The gardenature box has a perspex skylight to let the light in and create the beautiful colour pictures.  If you are a house hunting Blue Tit though, that needs careful investigation! More activity afterwards, so I assume it passed.

Serious house hunting

Unconfirmed reports were saying that more Blue Tits have been showing interest in our box last week, and this morning I caught a brief glimpse of one bird perched on the hole. I set the camera up to shoot ninety minutes of footage to skim through at 8x, and at 9:35am struck gold. The following three minute footage has had about 60 seconds of Blue Tit free time edited out.

I was doing jobs around the house, and didn't see the action until I was whizzing through the replay. I must confess to being very over excited - I think this project is going to work! The presence of the partner bird in the final few seconds of the clip must mean things are getting serious.


According to everything I've read, I think we still have two and a half weeks before they start building the nest. One final point of interest, the first tit on the extended visit can be seen playing close attention to the integrity of the entrance hole. Any birds that use a nest box are vulnerable to a woodpecker or squirrel enlarging the holed to get the young out. Rest assured our box has had a metal plate screwed on the outside - any Blue Tit family will be safe from that threat at least!

All quiet on the north eastern front

Work and school have effectively prevented much monitoring of the nest box this week, beyond a few glances at breakfast.  There is no motion detection software that is compatible with our video converter, so until we get some proper action capturing activity will rely on a little bit of luck. 


However, some internet research has warned us to be patient.  Our 27mm hole is perfectly designed for the Blue Tits examining the box on Sunday morning.  We are lucky they were quickly on the case, as they can spend up to five weeks examining a potential home for their offspring.  We should expect occupants around about first day of Spring (21st March), which is almost exactly five weeks after we installed it.  Perfect.


So, the blog will be fairly quiet for a while, but we have everything crossed for the end of March!

First viewings

The computer was fired up before the tea was brewing this morning, and I narrowly missed hitting record as a prospective customer cautiously peered in.  It didn't matter, because less than five minutes later, we caught this...

By the time breakfast was ready, we had enjoyed a longer visitation, and this time the partner bird was hanging around outside - probably saying the kitchen was too small, or the garden not wide enough...

We've been out for the rest of the day, and it is all quiet now.  Nevertheless, it feels like a great start!

Introduction

After several seasons of compulsively viewing Springwatch, this year we are joining in.  We've combined a gardenature camera nest box with an Elgato video capture dongle and software (Mac of course), and tested the set-up in the comfort of our living room...

So far so good.  Installation was fairly straightforward, it's nest box week so the web is full of assistance.  Basically, sloping slightly forward, and angled between North and East to avoid prevailing rain and direct sun.  The hardest part was enlarging a disused television aerial hole enough to get the chunky wire inside the house, but we managed, and it works by day...

...and by night...

Job done - installed and ready for viewing Saturday 18th February 2012.




Links to our kit here...


The nest box

Elgato video capture (cheaper on Amazon!)