Welcome to the 2024 beaks!

Last updated: 25th May 2024

They have gone! They all fledged between 6.40am and 9.00am this morning. I really hope the smallest one is big enough to survive. They were flitting around the tree and bushes opposite the nest box, getting used to their wings. The photo looks like it might be the little one, but it's difficult to tell.

That's it for 2024, folks! See you in 2025, and there will be better cameras - promise.

The visiting beaks

Curated highlights of the beak visits this year. The latest videos are at the top.

25/05/2024: The final video for 2024. They leave one by one between 6.40am and 9.00am. The final score is 5 fledging out of 8 eggs, which probably isn't too bad. Good luck little beaks! (Sorry for the dodgy exposure in places)

24/05/2024: There has been a few times when it looked like one of the beaks was going to actually fly out of the nestbox.

24/05/2024: There's something in the air in the box, and it's not the whiff of unhatched eggs, poo, and dead chicks. The beaks are restless and spending more time looking out of the entrance and flapping their wings. They want to leave, and I'm sure they will in the next day or two.

23/05/2024: When you have beautiful wings like the beaks, you need to keep them in shape by doing some preening, stretching and a bit of test flapping.

22/05/2024: Here's something a bit jollier. Five minutes in the nest box. The five beautiful beaks preening, stretching, flapping and the smallest beak eating a monster of a caterpillar.

22/05/2024: This documents the last hour of chick No. 6's life. Natural selection is brutal, but also gives us five healthy, flapping chicks. Well, four huge ones and one worryingly small one. Fingers crossed that we don't drop down to four.

20/05/2024: It's getting more and more crowded in there. There have also only been six chicks visible for a while now. There's a dead chick at the bottom of the nest, sadly. The rest seem to be healthy though. Especially the two huge ones.

19/05/2024: The size difference between the chicks seems to be getting larger each day. The smaller ones have to do a lot of climbing to make sure they aren't shoved to the bottom of the nest.

18/05/2024: There's a huge difference in size between the largest and smallest now. The smallest ones still don't have many feathers and haven't opened their eyes yet, while the largest ones have their eyes fully open, and are almost as large as the parents. Despite this, the adults make sure that the smallest beaks also get fed.

15/05/2024: In the first part, you can briefly see the unhatched egg which is still in the nest. The second part shows how hectic the pace of food in - poo out is.

15/05/2024: When you have two parents carrying food in and poo out all day, there come times when there's a bit of a traffic jam. The rule seems to be that the one carrying the poo has priority. Seems sensible.

12/05/2024: This is a bit of a hard watch. Mrs. T. gets caught up on something in the fluff of the nest. She gets out in the end, but it takes a long time and you can see that she's panicking. The nest gets left in a bit of a mess, but she does come back and sort it out, and everything goes back to normal. I was worried about this happening when I saw her bringing in man made fibres to the nest.

12/05/2024: During some routine nest maintenance, one of the beaklets escapes the nest and makes a bid for freedom. They don't get far before Mrs. T. pulls them back in.

09/05/2024: Mrs. T. brings in a caterpillar that is almost as big as the chicks are. She tries jamming it down a few beaks before finding one that goes down with a bit of help. Eventually. Five minutes later she has to pull it back out again. Undeterred, she finds another beak to shove it down.

07/05/2024: I think all the ones that are going to hatch have hatched now. There are seven chicks and one egg. I'm not sure if Mrs. T. is still rotating it or doing some wriggler re-arranging.

06/05/2024: Mr, and Mrs. T. put their heads together to try and work out how to get their kids to eat some insects. Any parent will know this situation.

06/05/2024: Five more hatched out overnight, and now there are 2 eggs and 6 begging mouths in the nest. Mrs. T. comes in with some food and takes their poo away.

05/05/2024: Mrs. T. brings in an insect for the new chick and wakes them up for a feed.

05/05/2024: This is the first sighting of the first pink wriggler. Mrs. T. looks a bit surprised when she sees him. She prises the eggshell half off their head and starts eating it to replace some of the calcium she lost making the eggs.

22/04/2024: At the start of this clip Mr. T. comes in and gives Mrs. T. a well deserved snack. She then does some egg rotation and has a good old wriggle on the eggs. In the second part you can see the 8 eggs clearly.

19/04/2024: At least 5 eggs under the fluff. In this video she packs some more fluffiness around the eggs before heading out of the box. Unusually, the eggs are left uncovered so we can see them.

14/04/2024: Mrs. T. laid an egg overnight, so we missed the actual event, but this is the first sighting of the first egg. Well done Mrs. T! Lots more to come.

12/04/2024: Bringing in fluffy things makes for a cosy nest, and Mrs. T. is making a very cosy nest for her chicks.

09/04/2024: Mrs. T continues to build her nest. It's slightly concerning that she's bringing in nylon fibres - the blue stuff in the second part of the clip. Let's hope that none of the beaks get caught up in it.

02/04/2024: Having cleared out the corpses, Mrs. T (previously described here as Mr. T) has started bringing in bits of grass for the nest. She hops into the entrance, and comes back in with another beakful - presumably handed beaked to her by Mr. T.

25/03/2024: He's done the easy part, removing the skull and a leg. Now it's the rest of the body, and it's an almost Sisyphean task which takes a few days. He does it eventually though, and his dogged beaked determination is an inspiration to us all.

23/03/2024: Mr. T. does some nest cleaning, getting rid of parts of the beaks that didn't make it last year. First he removes a skull and then a leg. I hate it when you move into a house, and the first thing you have to do is clear out the corpses of the previous residents.

18/03/2024: Mr. T. checks out the focal length of the camera. Lovely blurry close-ups.

18/03/2024: Too much of a modern beak for stereotypical gender roles, Mr. T. engages in some nest preparation.

26/02/2024: Mr. T. comes in to do some tidying and cleaning. In typical male tidying style, he moves a few bits of fluff around, gets rid of a small twig, and leaves the lumps of poo on the floor, untouched.

07/02/2024: How to tell Mr. and Mrs. T apart: Compare the red circled bits on Mr. and Mrs. T. First in the video, Mrs. T has a small "sideburn", and a wide white area between it and her blue cap. Mr. T. (second in the video) has a larger sideburn and hardly any white between the black and blue. Of course, Mr. T is bigger as well, but when there is only one in the box it's difficult to judge their size.

22/01/2024: Another check around from the Missus. Carefully inspecting all the nooks and crannies of the box.

18/01/2024: Mrs. BT pops in, has a look around, and waits ages while Mr. BT flaps around the entrance. He eventually comes in and they both flap out. It probably makes sense to a Blue Tit.

11/01/2024: Mr. B. Tit pops in for a look around too. This was quite early in the morning so the light level was low and so picture quality is gruesome.

07/01/2024: She's back, and checking the walls out this time. She's coming in a couple of times a day at the moment.

06/01/2024: The first recorded visit of a beak this year. A couple of days after turning the camera back on again, Mrs. Blue Tit pops in for a look around.