CAN SPRING, SPRING INTO LIFE?

Good news and bad news this week. The good news is the nestbox camera started to work again and revealed some very egg-citing news. The bad news is towards the end of the week it stopped working again!

I’m just relying on hope that it’ll somehow come back online because I can’t risk disturbing the pair of blue tits at this stage.

As you can see from the images below, the news this week has been around the laying of eggs. The first one was laid on Wednesday night, with another one joining it on Thursday night.

 

 

 

Unfortunately I was ‘on duty’ for my own offspring on Thursday night so the only pic I got was of the female roosting, by Friday morning, when I expected to get the image of more eggs, the camera had stopped transmitting.

Over the weekend I’ve noticed increased activity around the nestbox and the blue tits are still going in and out of it, so I can only assume there are more eggs and in a couple of weeks there will be chicks.

My concern at this point is the availability of caterpillars for the youngsters to feed on. The weather reports for the next week suggest no real warmth and with very few butterflies and moths being seen I’m not sure if there will be much, if any, food for the chicks.

I’ve got my supply of mealworms, so will be ready to supplement the natural food supply when I think the chicks have arrived (hopefully know because of the camera miraculously working), so support is at hand for the blue tits and the other birds visiting my garden.

In other news I have seen a few more bees about, although nowhere near as many as in recent Aprils, so I can only hope that the flowers I’ve got blooming in my garden are able to help the insects that are currently active.

I’m now seeing the robins in singles rather than the previous duos, so I’m presuming the female is sitting on eggs somewhere. I’d like to know where the nest is, even though I have an idea, but for now I’m happy with seeing one of the prospective parents following me around whenever I’m working outside.

Looking back on my blog from last year I noticed that the swallows arrived back later than this year, with the first one sighted in 2013 just over a week earlier than in 2012. Is this a sign for a good summer?

The six that did arrive in mid-April have now become just a pair, I suspect it’s simply a case of the group splitting up to find suitable nesting sites, but I presume the pair that has stayed is either parents from last year, or one of their youngsters.

Finally my sparrow nestbox has had some visitors and is becoming a regular perching spot for some of the groups of house sparrows that visit my garden. I watched out of the window yesterday as a male and female perched there and started looking at the holes to gain access.

Perhaps the late winter and delayed spring did help in my quest to provide house sparrow accommodation this year!