Welcome to the 2024 beaks!

Update: 14th April 2024

EGG! We have an egg! Congratulations to Mrs. T. on the successful laying of her first egg. She will be popping them out at the rate of about one a day for the next couple of weeks. Brilliant stuff!

See all the excitement on the live feed, and lots of action in the highlights.

The visiting beaks

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

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.