Yesterday Zac, Gillian & myself decided to take advantage of the break in the recent bad weather & head to Atherton Woods for a nest box check. We tried to do this last week, but the weather stopped us. This visit was mainly to see what stage the Tits were at in the breeding season & to ring a brood of Tawny Owls that we found in a natural hole.
Me & Gillian checked 60 boxes of which 47 were occupied. 31 by Blue Tits, 14 by Great Tit & 2 holding Nuthatch nests.
Zac is carrying out his university dissertation project in the woods this year, looking at whether Blue Tits overlap in territory whilst collecting nesting materials. So we left Zac to monitor his ten boxes. I won't go into great detail on this (I'll leave this for Zac) but he's using different colours of wool to help him answer this. So as you'll see from the below photos lots of the boxes we opened were rather colourful!
The brood of Tawny Owl were duly ringed before leaving the woods.
After dropping Zac off at the train station to head back to Bangor, I went to visit my parents at Pickmere in Cheshire. Again making the most of the better weather, a spot of Nest Recording was on the cards. A rather successful search gave us 8 Blackbird, 2 Dunnock, 1 Song Thrush, 1 Greenfinch & 1 Blackcap nest to monitor for the scheme.
However find of the day has to go to Gillian for finding this nest -
Taaddaaa……. Clutch of 6 Robin eggs….
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