Article published in The Charlbury Chronicle (June 1998)

by Christine Elliott 

Last June I began to tell you about the blue tits nesting in our box fitted with a camera. I'm now going to tell you the end of the story, but beware, real life does not make comfortable reading. From the 11 eggs which the female started to incubate on 27th April, six youngsters fledged on 26th May. There were only two unhatched eggs, so what of the other three? 

Nine must have hatched on 8th May but we only saw 8 mouths being fed - maybe the ninth died immediately and was thrown out. They grew fast, but on the 21st, there were only 7 and only the female was feeding them - the male had gone; and the next day there were only 6! Although I feared the worst, I have heard other theories. The two chicks had been really strong and had been behaving very aggressively towards the male. As the plumage develops on the young males, the male adult can see them as a threat and give them a hard time, the youngsters can then gang up and retaliate. However, being so strong and aggressive, these two could then have fledged early with the male going to look after them, leaving the female with the rest of the brood. At this stage she can cope alone because being slightly hungry encourages fledging - this happened 5 days later and I then saw the male back in the garden, so maybe this is what happened. 

The rest of the story is quite harrowing and without the camera I would have been totally unaware of how vulnerable the box was. Three evenings before fledging I was watching the nest live on TV when I suddenly saw a long white cat's paw stretch into the box and grab one of the young birds - it was pinned against the front of the box by his wings - I screamed at the cat from the window until it let go and jumped down. The shocked birds in the box were lying deathly still and only stirred when the female returned with food. The cat would have been attracted by the noisy youngsters but I would never have expected it to have been able to climb up the rose on the garage wall. To avoid further attacks I removed several branches from the climbing rose. However, this wasn't the only predatory attack, at 6 a.m. on the morning they fledged, a large pale beak protruded into the box but couldn't quite reach them and gave up. Of course, there will probably have been other attacks which didn't get videoed! 

The six birds left the box on Bank Holiday Monday between 8 a.m. and 3.30 p.m. but the last bird had a damaged foot and kept falling off wherever he perched. The female was still feeding him but since he kept falling into the undergrowth they were both at serious risk from cats. By evening, he was still very alert so we decided to intervene and take him to St. Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital near Thame - en route we fed him mealworms. He was housed with several other baby birds and his foot was to be investigated in the morning - we never learnt his fate but we hope that he recovered. 

Watch wildlife closely and you will always learn something new, we were surprised how the male always landed in the box on the left and the female on the right - probably to avoid collision. The female clearly had a ring on her left leg and we think that it was her second year in the same box. I have seen her feeding several times in the garden this year and would love to find out where she has nested, please phone me if you have seen a ringed blue tit in your garden. By the way, if you see a dead bird, always check for a ring. For all the thousands of birds ringed each year, the recovery rate is very low. The ring is numbered and shows the words British Museum - good enough all round the world for the return of the ring. The British Museum passes the ring on to the British Trust for Ornithology who then send you information about when and where the bird was ringed in the first place.