For the eighth January running, FOAW joined Steve Joul in cleaning out and surveying the nest boxes in Adel Woods.
We had a great team of seven until lunchtime, when some of us had to leave for other duties. In the afternoon, there was a team of three. The weather was perfect – dry, mild and no wind. Your correspondent even worked up a sweat in the afternoon!
As usual, pretty well all of the tit boxes were used last Spring, but none of the robin boxes were used.
The robin boxes have never been used by robins (we have had the odd tit nest) and so we probably ought to think about moving them. Currently, they are all stationed in the middle of holly bushes about two or three feet off the ground. So very difficult and prickly to find – at least for human beings.
A multicoloured tit nest!
Every year the survey is different and this year was no exception. It is quite usual to find the odd unhatched egg in the nesting material, and we measure the eggs to see if the nest box was used by blue tits or the larger great tits. This year, we found a number of nests containing the skeletons of chicks – in a couple as many as five or six. This was unusual – we have probably found no more than a couple of skeletons in total in all the previous seven years of surveying nest boxes.
Measuring eggs found in a nest box
The number of skeletons found this year seems to suggest that there were some difficulties for tits during the breeding season – presumably bad weather which meant that there was insufficient food to feed all the young.
However, it was not a disastrous season. Blue tits typically lay about 8 to 12 eggs but sometimes lay as many as 16! Great tits typically lay 7 to 9 eggs but may lay as many as 15. So even where a number of the young died in the nest last season, the chances are that perhaps four or five young successfully grew up and left the nest.
This year we had one nuthatch nest in our tit boxes. Nuthatch nests are very different from tit nests which are made of moss, fur, hair and grass. The first suggestion that a nuthatch has nested in the box is that the lid is glued down, and all gaps in the woodwork are filled, with mud. When opened the nest is made of lots of little chips of wood – rather like a bowl of bran flakes! It was pleasing to have a nuthatch nest – we didn’t have any last year, though we had two a couple of years ago. Interestingly, the nuthatch nest was in the box by the bridge near Adel Pond – the very same tree where nuthatches nested previously.
A nuthatch nest in one of our woodcrete nest boxes – unfortunately, not a clear picture, but you can see where the nuthatches have plastered mud round the rim of the nest box.
We finished work as dusk began to fall at about 4 pm, by which time we had surveyed 18 nest boxes.
Friends of Adel Woods 