Blue Tit Big Brother (dev)

Well we have arrived here in Muonio, Lapland ready for the start of our great adventure. Tomorrow we will meet the dogs who are to transport us across this vast snowy Wilderness.

It is -14°C outside and everything Is covered in a Crisp layer of Snow. I am full of both excitement and fear. Will I be fit enough? Will I cope with the cold? Will my cold clear up enoough to allow me to enjoy this experience?

I guess I will find out soon.

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I want to see more of removing the battery.

I’ll save this and come back later.

OK. A few minutes later and my post is still there.

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As Chris has said Karma is the calmer of the two birds and Buzz the more energetic. You can also tell them apart by their facial markings: Karma has a smaller white triangle patch above the eyes and wider eye stripes and Buzz has a larger white triangle and narrower eye stripes. No idea which is the male and which the female. Can anyone enlighten us? Otherwise time will tell.

Here are a couple more snippets from the nestcam for you. Firstly we see the calmer of the two birds, whom Sophie has named Karma, asking the question “What’re you looking at?”

And then the exciting moment when both blue tits were in the box together. Watch closely - it wasn’t a very long moment! Seems like in the blue tit world, two’s a crowd.

You can often tell when there is a blue tit at the doorway as the light levels start fluctuating a lot. See how the more manic bird, whom Sophie has named Buzz, seems to crouch and cower as Karma stands at the door just before his/her great entrance.

Tags: blue tit, nestbox, NestCam

We spent the day working in our newly laid out garden today. We had a bunch of plants to plant in the bog garden, and a Victoria plum tree up at the end of the lawn. We’ve got a little seating area on decking right at the bottom of the garden, in what will be the ‘wildlife area’ when it all gets established. We’ll be sowing a wild flower meadow up there in March, and the pond and bog garden are already taking shape. Whilst up on the seating area I managed to get this snap of a siskin snacking on nyjer seed.

Siskins have become quite a regular visitor to the garden recently, and love the new pond. This morning we also saw a thrush at the bird bath, moving on to the pond after that. This is unusual - we don’t see many thrushes in the garden at all. Earlier in the week I’m pretty sure I saw a grey wagtail too. It was sitting on the shed gutter, then flew off to the pond where it did that classic wagtail bob.

Tags: bog garden, feeder, Garden, siskin

I did my hour’s bird count this morning. Unfortunately the 2 long tailed tits I saw the other day didn’t show up and the goldfinches and dunnocks were shyer than usual. Anyway I saw:

6 siskins
2 robins
1 goldfinch
1 dunnock
3 blackbirds
2 blue tits
5 starlings
6 sparrows
1 wren
2 collared doves
1 wood pigeon.

We’ve got some wonderful new blue tit film… watch this space!

Tags: big garden bird watch, birds, blackbird, blue tit, dunnock, robin, rspb, siskin, sparrow, starling, wren

It looks like one or more blue tits is popping in quite regularly. When we saw this chap this morning we thought at first he was becoming much more comfortable with the surroundings, as he just sat there for ages, chilling out. Which doesn’t make for the most exciting video, but here you go:

But only a few minutes later the nest box was occupied once again. The visitor’s behaviour this time was much more like the bird we saw last week, manically checking out every corner of the nest box. So now we’re thinking that there are two different blue tits popping in. We see two hanging around the tree quite a bit, but what we don’t know is whether they’re a pair, or two of the same sex arguing about who’s going to have this prime site.

Tags: blue tit, nestbox, NestCam

Exciting news! We’ve seen a blue tit visiting our Big Brother nest box. It’s taken me most of the day to work out how to get the video up to YouTube Google Video, but here you go:

Tags: blue tit, nestbox, NestCam