This is always a busy time in my garden, as I start getting activity in my camera nest boxes. I have watched this whole process lots of times now and I get excited every time as I see birds prospecting and checking out the boxes for the first time in the season. I never tire of watching this incredible story unfold! This year, I have been experimenting with some new set-ups, with internal lighting which works on a sensor, so switching off at night. The increased lighting inside of the box does not seem to affect the birds at all and, in the wild, they would choose natural sites, where cracks and crevices would allow daylight inside. This lighting greatly improves the image quality and the images from this box by Jason Fathers at Wildlife Windows, is using a good quality nest box camera, but a great lighting system that he has designed. The Blue tits were in this box within 2 hours of me putting it up… and today, they started bringing in moss!
The Jackdaws are regularly looking in my Pear Tree nest box and I think they will start bringing in nesting materials very soon…
My tawny is still sitting steady on her single egg and the male, on the whole, is delivering one meal a night to her… a good mixture of voles and mice and the one frog we had last week! Last night, he brought both a mouse and a vole, within an hour of each other…
We are almost half way through incubation now!
Lots of visitors to my Mammal Box and I am hoping the hedgehog visitors will appear again soon maybe…
Finally, last week I showed my very pregnant vixens. They have now given birth and make very brief visits to the feeding station for a quick snack before returning to the cubs. My Bushnells set up on 2 prospective den sites, showed no results, so I am still none the wiser as to where they have hidden their cubs! You can see from these screen shots that these vixens are now lactating and this will become increasingly obvious as the cubs grow and the vixens produce more milk.
Spring is such an exciting time and I’m looking forward to checking footage at Yew View tomorrow!