Tuesday 29 April 2014

Side-View bird box, early interest

Well, I am usually genuinely surprised when things actually work, so it was with great excitement that we spotted this fella poking his head into our new bird box to take a look.

Blue tit inspecting potential home


We're pretty sure its a blue tit.  My first thought was to check the activity log that is generated via the two infra-red beams at the entrance hole.  There are two IR beams, an inner and an outer one, so theoretically one should be able to distinguish between entrance / exit / head-in / head-out.  Why you might ask...? ;)

Nest box in situ, and activity log.  Yellow activity is this blue tit.

The log shows the activity to date, where the two numbers represent the beam, then the beam state:
1=Outer, 0=Inner  and 1=Whole, 0=Broken, for example 1,0=outer beam broken.
On closer inspection of the log, I seem to have mis-coded that...


I originally thought Mr Blue tit was the first look-in I'd had, as it was the first caught on camera, however the log showed otherwise, with some interest five days ago.  A quick re-visit of recorded footage showed a shadow briefly obscuring the entrance hole at the exact time of the logged event on the 24 April.  There's no way I would have spotted this so it shows the IR beams are doing their jobs.

I'm considering putting up a miniature gallery along the lines of 'Birds & insects that have made brief appearances in our nesting boxes'.  Fascinating viewing I'm sure !

?Coal Tit making brief appearance into owl squirrel box

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