House hunting

In the past few days there has been activity in the camera nest box with multiple visits from a pair of blue tits.  When I cleaned out all the other nest boxes in the garden at the beginning of the year I left this one untouched.  It was started by a pair of blue tits last year but they stopped before their nest was completed, probably because one of them was taken by a sparrowhawk.  I left it to see what happened as it already has a layer of dried moss which should save this year's birds some work.  The first view a few days ago was in early morning in poor light so the camera was mostly in infrared mode and the pictures were mainly black and white.

Here is a short video clip in better light to show the two of them.

This box has been up since 2009 and has been occupied every year since then.  In the first year it had great tits and in 2017 a pair of tree sparrows.  Every year from 2010-2016 it was occupied blue tits.

I have records of the date of the start of nest building for 5 of the previous 6 blue tit nests and it varied between 09 March and 04 April, presumably influenced mainly by the weather.  So far I haven't seen any nest material being brought in this year but these birds have a head start.  First laying dates in the past have varied between 23 April to 10 May with clutches of 2 to 11 eggs.  In the 8 years of blue tit nests altogether there were 43 eggs, of which 42 hatched and all 42 fledged, so productivity has been relatively good.

If these two do take over the box and complete the nest I'll post regular updates on a separate page via a "Nestbox Camera 2019" tab at the top of the blog.  That's assuming they evade the sparrowhawk.