This spring a black-crested titmouse family chose to nest in one of our boxes, and we recorded every moment of their residence: Nest building, laying and incubating 5 eggs, feeding the 3 chicks who hatched, and then the chicks’ courageous first flights.
Start to finish (or should we say first nest twig to last chick out the door?) the process took about a month. The mama bird laid her first egg almost immediately, before the nest was even halfway completed, then incubation took 14 days, and then the chicks were transformed from tiny pink blobs into real birds in 16 days. It happened very fast – every day the chicks were noticeably different. There’s a kind of magic at work when you think about it.
One of the most interesting things about watching this titmouse family was being able to listen to all the different sounds they made. The male clicked and squeaked at his mate during nest selection and building, both parents chirped to tell their hatchlings that lunch had arrived, and the chicks chittered their little hearts out when their parents appeared with food.
Our production guru, Martin Bludworth, helped us create this video – it was a huge job that involved sifting through a month’s-worth of 30-second clips (about 50,000 of them) and assembling them into the fascinating 20-minute story we’ve published here.