I carried out my third nest box check of the season in Atherton Woods this morning & ringed my first brood of Great Tits of the year, which are by far the earliest I’ve done! These chicks were at the FS (feathers short) stage.
Today I checked 33 boxes, of these 19 contained Blue Tit nests, 13 Great Tit and 1 Nuthatch nest. All the Great Tit nests contained young, with all but one of the Blue Tit nests containing eggs – the remaining nest had very young chicks in (below). The Nuthatch box held six 3-4 day old chicks.
I managed to lift 15 female Blue Tits off their eggs resulting in ringing 9 new birds & recapping 6. I was expecting to have recapped more adults, due to netting the Atherton Woods feeding station last winter. I also managed to lift the Nuthatch off her young & she was already ringed TP82742 – ringed in the same box last year as a pullus and recaptured several times at the feeding station during the winter.
Many of the female Blue Tits that I lifted off nests seemed to be in poor condition…
Ahead of everything else though, the Great Tits are getting on with it!
One thing is for certain things seem to be happening much earlier this year!
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