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Heavy rain on Monday saw the BirdCam go offline for the day but today it was back in full working order. Unfortunately when the camera came back online, the pictures were less than pleasing. There is only one baby blue tit visible in the nest and regretfully it’s dead. The last few days the number of blue tits fell from the initial 10 to just 5 on Sunday.

Unfortunately the Bank Holiday weather caused the camera to fail at just the wrong moment so it is unlikely that we will know what happened. However, we had noticed that the birds were not growing as fast as expected so we are assuming the adult parents may have had trouble competing with other birds for food.

Summary

Eggs: 11
Hatched: 10
Survived: 0

Unusual activity in the bird box today. The adult was flying between the bird feeder and the bird box trying to feed seeds to the young ones. Most of the baby birds would not take the seed but when one did it passed straight through and out the other end! The bird does a flip and the mother takes the rejected seed away!

Can anyone out there explain this unusual behaviour?

After just over two weeks of incubating, the first baby blue tits have hatched!

The following clip shows the hatchlings (now just a few hours old!) being fed caterpillers by both the female and male adult. The adults chirp when they arrives with the food to get the attention of the baby birds.

There were 11 eggs in total and 6 or 7 have hatched today.

Here are a few videos I took with my mobile phone whilst in the Lake District last week.

This clip shows Wastwater, a beautiful lake in the Wasdale Valley. Wastwater is 3 miles long and a third of a mile wide and the deepest of all the lakes. I was sat at the bottom of the lake in the grounds of the youth hostel who kindly allowed me to park in their car park while I spent time photographing the lake.

The second clip contains the three waterfalls (or “forces” as they are known locally) we visited whilst in the Lake District.

The first is Aira Force, situated on land owned by the National Trust. We visited this fall on the first day of our 4 day trip. It is about a 5-10 minute walk from the National Trust car park. You can pass over the bridge above the waterfall and descend via a path to the pool at the bottom.

The second waterfall is Stock Ghyll Force which is located in Ambleside. It was only a 15 minute walk from our hotel and a couple of minutes walk from the entrance gate, making it a very convenient fall to visit.

The final waterfall is Stanley Ghyll Force in Eskdale. This fall is great but the walk along the river to the fall was more impressive. The woodland area along the river and surrounding the fall is extremely lush and beautiful but unfortunately not captured here in my rather washed out video clip! You cross over a couple of wooden bridges and up some quite hazardous steps before walking along a narrow path to reach the waterfall.

I will be posting my photos from the Lake District to my flickr page in the next couple of weeks.