Day 1 after first eggs hatched. Heavy rain early morning. Still just 4 chicks hatched at 7am. They are sitting in the gap around the rest of the eggs so that the eggs are supporting them upright with their heads close together in the middle of the nest. They move very slowly and aren't making any sounds that we can hear. Both parents feeding them and the female sitting on them periodically. The parents make clicking noises at the chicks when feeding them. The male will come in with food, pass it to the female and then leave immediately, while she reaches down beneath her and feeds the chicks very gently.
. . . Tragedy struck at 11 a.m. when a neighbour's cat (the same one who raided it in 1997) climbed up the garage wall, stuck a paw in and destroyed the nest. We hadn't realised how vulnerable the box was and will have to take steps to make it safe from cats next time. If we hadn't had seen this we wouldn't have realised what had happened, similar tragedies are happening all the time when people put boxes in unsafe positions. The bewilderment and distress of the parents afterwards was awful to watch.
. . . Since then we have put a sheet of hard plastic on the garage wall and surrounded the box with branches of holly.
Incubation continues (day 12). Weather sunny in morning but cold and windy in the afternoon. Male feeding female in the box at 7am. Female still very restless looking out of the hole and sometimes leaving the box for several minutes to feed. Eggs being turned a lot. Watching the website at work the pictures don't get updated past 2.44pm. When we get home at 6.15pm we find that the PC has hung and that 3 eggs have hatched. A 4th one hatches before 7pm. The female seems to remove the shell straight away and eats some of it to restore her calcium levels before flying out of the box with it. The male comes in to feed the female and the chicks and removes the other half of the eggshell. Babies very small, naked and sprawling. Their wide open mouths can be seen and the dark mounds where their eyes will open later on. Very difficult counting the remaining eggs now. The female leaves them to collect food but still sits on them when she returns. The adults feed the young very gently, between them both they divide the food up into smaller pieces before placing it in the mouths of the babies. The adults seem to position themselves anywhere at the moment, jumping over each other to get out of the box. Female settles down to sleep an hour later than last night at 8.30pm.
Incubation continues (day 11). Female continues to bring in relatively large whitish feathers and leave them on the top of the nesting material. Female settles down by 7.30pm but periodically wakes up and turns the eggs all through the night.
Incubation continues (day 10). Definitely 10 eggs. Male still visiting her with food but she still leaves the box for a few minutes at a time herself and doesn't bother to cover the eggs over while she's away. She sits stock still for several minutes at a time but sometimes she's very active and turns the eggs a lot. She seems quite restless and changes her position a lot to face different directions. Sometimes she jumps up to the hole to look out. On occasions she does a security check of the hole, she taps her beak around the hole from the inside and then stretches round to check the outside of the box - a bit like at the early nestbuilding stage.
Incubation continues (day 9). The female turns the eggs to allow air to circulate so that the embryos inside can breathe air diffusing through the shell. When the chick gets near hatching, it shifts its position inside the egg and pushes its bill into the air sac at the blunt end of the egg to begin breathing.
Incubation continues (day 8). The female will be monitoring the temperature of the eggs while shuffling them around with her beak. This shuffling takes a lot of physical effort - her whole body upends and nearly flips over while she is pushing the eggs around in the nest bowl.
Incubation continues (day 7). The eggs need to be turned to make sure that they are evenly warmed and also to allow the embryos to develop properly inside.
Incubation continues (day 6). The female doesn't fluff herself up or put her head under her wings during the day, so we assume this means that she stays awake during the day and only sleeps at night.
Incubation continues (day 5). The female will be carefully gauging the temperature of her eggs which will affect the development of the embryos inside. On warm sunny days she will be able to leave them for longer than on cold wet and windy days.
Incubation continues (day 4). Because the female didn't start incubating them until all of them were laid they will all hatch at the same time and all have the same chance of survival. The first Swifts have arrived back from Africa to breed on the buildings in Charlbury.
Incubation continues (day 3). Female leaves the box periodically to feed and leaves the eggs exposed during this short time. The male also visits her with food and feeds her inside the box. Sometimes he arrives and she's not there so he waits around for her outside the box.
Definitely incubating. The female will have lost feathers from her brood patch. This is a large bald patch on her breast area with a rich supply of blood vessels, which she uses to transfer her body heat to her developing eggs. When she was sitting the eggs before she began to incubate them, her feathers would have insulated the eggs from her body heat.
10 eggs maybe - very difficult to count once there are so many because they can lie under each other, although they are mostly lying in a single layer. Raining early morning. Looked like she was incubating because she only left for a short while at 6.30am. Male brought food in to her at 6.45am. Lots of loud trilling and chirping as soon as he arrives outside the box, even before he comes in to feed her. She rotates the eggs frequently with her beak and you can hear them moving against each other. Saw the first House Martins arrive over the town.
9 eggs. Female left the box at 7.05 and then began bringing back material to cover them. Rained very heavily from 5pm onwards.
8 eggs. Partially covered at 6.10pm.
7 eggs partially covered at 8.12am, but all covered by 8.50am. Female arrived back at the box at 12.30pm and sat on the eggs - we thought she might be starting to incubate them but she left at 12.54pm leaving them uncovered and didn't return until 2.17pm.
6 eggs. Sunny day.
5 eggs. Sunny day.
4 eggs revealed when she left the box at 6.14am. All covered over by 6.30am.
3 eggs revealed at 6am. By 6.45am she started bringing in more hair to cover them over and they were fully covered within 10 minutes. Female arrived back in the box in the evening at 7.07pm.
Male visited her with food several times in the box early in the morning before she left at 6.51am revealing 2 eggs. She came back later to cover them over with more nesting material and left them during the day. She returned at 7.30pm to spend the night in the box and sat covering the eggs all night. Repeatedly she would upend herself to turn the eggs around and bring them up to the surface to stop them being buried.
Female awake 5.30am and left the box at 6am revealing an egg. The egg was left uncovered all day and the female returned at 7pm. The male visited too. During the evening the female spent lots of time fussing around the egg and turning it.
6.45am box empty. Female arrived at box in the evening at 7.09pm.
Scruffy in the box overnight so she must definitely be the female, so it was Mrs Scruffy and Mr Smart after all. Overnight her feathers were very fluffed up and she slept with her head under her wing, so it was very hard distinguishing her from the nesting material - the tail sticking out was the give away. At 5am when it was just getting daylight, the male arrived outside the box and began calling to her inside. He made alarm calls and his courtship lovesong. The female woke up periodically but kept dozing off again and eventually left the box at 5.30am to join the male outside. Female back in the box at 7pm and stayed overnight.
Sunny day. 7am rendezvous again. Scruffy bringing in short bundles of something from behind the bushes in next door's garden and dropped these at the edge of the nest bowl forming a circle. We put out some soft dog hair and some lamb's wool under a plastic domed bird feeder near to the nestbox. This was extremely popular and the nest box soon filled up. Both birds seen flying around together.
7am rendezvous again. By evening the nestbowl shape was very visible.
Box empty overnight but at 7am the birds seemed to rendezvous at the box, Scruffy would flying to the outside of the nesthole repeatedly looking in and sometimes going in to wait. When Smart made a loud trilling sound outside Scruffy left the box and made some sounds in response and they flew off together. Lots more grass in the box by the evening.
Raining. Scruffy busy bringing in nesting material at 7am but both birds seen forming the nest bowl at the back of the box with their bodies. They push their body down into the nest material and make a swimming action with their wings. Smart visited periodically but they mostly didn't stay in the box together, Scruffy would leave as soon as Smart turned up. However, they did do some beak pecking with each other. By evening, loads more grass in the box.
No sign of either bird in the box at 7am. Grass brought into the box by the evening.
Smart waiting ages in empty box for Scruffy. Smart sat very quietly and when Scruffy was heard outside Smart jumped up to the hole to look outside. When Scruffy came in Smart left very quickly.
Intense courting activity in the box. Also saw our ringed female from 1997 eating aphids on the rose opposite the box. One bird in the box has patchy markings on the front of its head above the beak and one has a clear white area there - Mr/Mrs Scruffy or Mr/Mrs Smart - we just can't tell them apart at this stage. With blue tits, there is no easy way of telling the sexes apart, so at this stage we just need to be able to distinguish one bird from the other. When their behaviour become quite clearcut i.e. the female will definitely be the one to lay the eggs, we can then look back and identify who did what at the early stages when we weren't sure. Then anpther year we can use that gradual build-up of knowledge to identify the sexes by their behaviour in the early stages of nest building.