Early Birds

The Adopt-A-Box team were out early yesterday morning checking a few nest boxes to see how the season was shaping up and got a real surprise!  For Blue and Great Tits the nesting season starts with a one to two week period of nest building.  The nest platform is usually constructed out of moss and perhaps some dry grass and once a depth of a couple of inches is reached then the nest cup is shaped into the moss.  The nest cup is then lined with wool, feathers or hair to give a cosy lining before a random mix of similar material is spread across the top of the nest.  Eggs are laid at the rate of one a day and incubation does not start until the the clutch is almost complete.  For titmice at Foxglove egg laying usually takes from 6 to 10 days and in mid April it would be usual to find birds actively building nests and perhaps a few nests that were reaching the lined stage ready for eggs.  So imagine our surprise when we looked into one box and after carefully moving the top cover counted 5 eggs and in three more found 4 eggs!  This means that  these birds started laying on the 10th or 11th April and this is a good 4 or 5 days earlier than we have recorded in the recent past!

So what does this mean?  Well the season has got off to a really really early start and it remains to see whether the rest of the nesting pairs start egg laying quite soon or this develops into a very protracted egg laying season.  It also means that for those who have not signed up to Adopt-A-Box, time is running out for this year, so please contact the Reserve Managers to book your box!

...............and here are two nests I photographed earlier showing the covered and then the uncovered: