So I am on guard because my bird box has a family of Blue Tits in it. I can now confirm that these are Blue Tits because I identified them using the big poster that came with The Guardian this week. Of course, I jest. I knew the genus of bird already. Anyhow, both birds are darting back and forth and the other morning I noticed a neighbour’s cat sitting on top of the shed, spying on a returning bird. The blue tit was alarmed and could see his foe and began to panic. I immediately stopped what I was doing in the kitchen and ran out into the garden, scaring the cat off the shed roof. The blue tit then immediately flew into the box with his precious cargo and zipped right back out again. They don’t seem to be too alarmed at me in the garden, but don’t like the cats. Well I managed to snap this picture of the bird about to fly into the box. OK – I am not David Bailey and I don’t have a huge lens on my camera – it’s just a Sony point-and-click handheld jobby, but this is the best I could do:

By my reckoning, the fledglings should be appearing sometime at the end of next week. I’ve been reading all about blue tits and it says that families tend to stay close together once they nest, with the year’s new chicks not straying any further than 1Km from their parents. Maybe we’ll have a blue tit enclave at Chez Lock? Maybe I need to buy some more bird boxes?

« »