There was a time in the past when television schedulers and production companies provided far fewer programmes of interest in the ‘summer’, anticipating that perhaps the Gurt Bwitish public would be outside, sunning themselves under milky, blustery skies or incinerating sausages on barbecues, instead of being slumped into a sofa, fat cat on lap, mug of PG tips in hand, watching yet another detective or costume drama on the Beeb.

 Incidentally, that (barbecue) is the correct way to spell the word. “Barbeque” (commonplace these days on pub car park blackboards etc) would be pronounced “barbeck”, and that just wouldn’t be the same.

Even though the weather in the southeast of England for the last week or so hasn’t exactly been “summery”, if TV companies are still running to “seasons”, I suppose the summer season has now started on our goggleboxes?

But I’m not sure.

I’m not sure because:

 a) I don’t know if the old seasonal “rules” still apply these days to TV schedules &

b) The live footage on our old portable TV in the conservatory (from various nest cameras in the garden and house) means there would be little on the box to interest me more than the ACTUAL stuff happening in our back garden and being filmed by me, LIVE.

Why would I spend any of my free time watching a miserable soap opera (“leave it aaaaat Phil. Eee ain’t werf itttt”) or another blummin cookery show (who on earth do celebrity chefs think they are?!) on the box when there’s so much more drama, intrigue and action in the birds’ nests / pond / sky / garden in general right now.

And like I’ve mentioned, I have set up a few live video feeds from birds’ nests straight into our old conservatory portable TV, for a privileged insight into the birds’ nesting behaviour.

Of course, I do watch some TV programmes. I’ve recently upgraded our cable TV package to include all sky sports. For good reason. At least I think so.

For someone like me, the summer also means a lot of sport on the box. Even the home nation rugby summer tours are televised on SKY over the summer, so “my” rugby season is 12 months long, give or take and then there’s the golf, tennis, Canadian dwarf-tossing championships etc... So I will get my “fix” of TV... even if it’s almost all sport coverage (minus the football world cup this summer – I’d rather watch my toenails grow than watch that televised prima-donnas’ cheat-fest).

But back to the nests and the weather! (I’ll leave the Poplar hawk moths, the cockchafers, the rose chafers, stag beetles, tadpoles, herons, kites, fox cubs, barn owls and little owls for another post....)

Weather for the last few weeks.

I’ve said before (I’ll no doubt say again) that blogs which dwell on weather tend to bore me rigid. But this month at least, the weather deserves a mention as it has been a little topsy-turvy. A little up and down. And that has had a definite effect on my wildlife sightings.

May will go down on record as being very wet. Certainly for the SE of England. MUCH wetter than normal. Perhaps the wettest in some parts of SE England for decades. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Up until the third week of May, the weather down here was pretty good. Often very sunny and warm. I know I spend much of my free time outside, peering at the sky or into undergrowth, so I often have a sun tan from April to September and this year is no different. Then the third week of the month arrived and all changed.

The jet-stream “broke” (AGAIN!) and we’ve had a strange set of fronts coming in from the east. We’ve had bucket loads of rain, hail and blustery winds. In fact for five out of the last seven days (as I type) we’ve had pretty-well constant rain.

A wee look at the jet stream forecast suggests (despite hysterical headlines in the usual rags – the Express, the Mail telling us we’re going to have a 6 week heat wave (from Mid May they both said)) the jet stream looks pretty broken until mid June at the earliest. Oh sure we’ll get the odd nice warm, sunny day, but the general picture for now looks unsettled. At best.

Swifts.

Regular visitors to this blog will know of my obsession with swifts. I will attempt not to bore you too much on this subject (I know, I know), but I should give you a quick update on these magnificent birds.

I was hoping for nesting swifts this year, and have provided 7 nesting spots, all with mini HD video cameras inside and after the last two years of having prospecting swifts each day in the summer, checking out our house, I thought we had a good chance this year of getting a prospector to actually nest.

Not so I’m afraid.  I’m pretty disappointed to be honest.

I’ve played my swift call CD (expertly edited by my father-in-law) dawn and dusk and we’ve had a few swifts knock around the area for a while, but no serious prospecting let alone nesting.

Around the 20^th May, a pair of swifts did seem rather keen to check out the noise coming from the CD player and even screamed back at the recordings a few times. But unlike the last two years, where we had two or three screamers and bangers (alighting on our walls), we have had nothing on that level yet.

For sure we’ll get no breeders this year – almost all swift eggs are laid by the middle or end of May, but I really hope we get some serious prospecting again in June, when younger, non-breeding swifts prospect for nest sites next year.

If we don’t get that, I fear my “swift clock” will have to be restarted. When we moved to this town 3 years ago, I predicted that it would be five years before I got “my” swifts back nesting with us. Even though things seemed to be progressing ahead of schedule for the last two years, the lack of serious prospecting this year has meant that I think it may STILL be ANOTHER 5 years before I get the best bird of all back with us. I’m not sure if we’ll even be in the same house, or town, or area of the UK by then.  So it’s pretty depressing really.

That said, of course I’ll continue to play the CD, cross my fingers and hope for more activity and “better” weather in June. I see a couple of swifts over the house most days still, but this year has been a weird one for swifts and sightings of swifts.

The weather this May means the swifts have been coming and going much more than normal. Swifts generally arrive and stick around if the weather suits them (and doesn’t constantly knock their insect food out of the sky) but this month the swifts have been moving around a lot. Avoiding the downpours. They have been feeding elsewhere a lot of the time – and potentially prospecting elsewhere also. Further north and further west I’d think.

Anyway... enough (for now) on swifts. What about the real activity in nest boxes? The “success stories”?

Starlings.

This year, in April, pair of starlings took up residence in my soffit swift nesting space, despite me insisting to them that they really shouldn’t. I gave up after a while, figuring I’d provided enough spots for swifts should they arrive and the starlings promptly left me a “box of chocolates” all over the patio (as a thankyou present I guess) and promptly bred.

I had (still have) a mini HD video camera recording all activity in the soffit nest – and Anna and I witnessed the hatching of four starling eggs and development of the young.

Mid-way through development, the smallest chick, the “runt of the litter”, died (it was out fought for its parents’ attention and offerings of food), got trampled and cr@pped on, and eventually was dragged out of the nest by the adult female and thrown to the patio below.

Three nestlings were successfully raised from then on – and all three fledged several weeks ago. A good result I’d say.

It took the parents less than two days to start again in the nest. Starlings often have multiple broods in a season, especially if they get off to a good start and this occurred in our soffit this year.

A HUGE second nest was built on the first nest and the female duly laid more eggs. At least three eggs hatched (difficult to be sure because of all the nesting material in front of the camera lens) and the parents fed all the young for about 8 days.

Then suddenly an abrupt end.

After the wettest May day for many years here (constant rain for 20 hours or so), it was clear that the 8 day old nestlings weren’t a) making any noise b) moving in the nest c) being visited by the parents with food.

So what had happened?

A few days investigation led me to believe that the adult female died suddenly on that very wet May day.

How?

Who knows?

Perhaps she was nabbed by one of the local sparrowhawks. Or a cat. Perhaps she had been cleft in twain by a model helicopter’s rotor blade or flown into a window pane at speed? Or perhaps she had simply expended so much energy in breeding this year, got soaked through and utterly exhausted - & simply dropped dead.

What was clear though is that she died and the developing young, still pretty featherless, weren’t warmed by her on one night, or fed by her. The adult male would not have brooded his young overnight and probably returned to the nest in a confused, agitated state (as much as starlings can be confused and agitated), and stopped (on his own) trying to feed nestlings that were either dead or dying.

The dead nestlings are still in the soffit (I should remove what’s left come the autumn I guess) and the adult male still sits on next door’s rooftop TV aerial,  singing rather quietly. Very sad.

But at least the pair managed to successfully fledge three young this year. Starling numbers have crashed spectacularly over the past 10 years or so (no-one knows why), so they need our “help” every bit as swifts do.

All in all though, a bit of a sad end really to a good start to these birds’ breeding season. And all this hidden story we were privileged to watch on a portable TV from inside the house. Without a mini cam in the soffit space we’d have had no idea what went on in our roof, from April until mid May this year. We’d have missed the whole thing. The successful first brood and the sad second. All of it.

Now there are some people (perhaps reading this?) who might (I doubt it) see a starling sing quietly on a TV aerial and think nothing of it. It’s just a bird. Who cares what type? Who cares about any life story associated with that bird? Who gives a monkeys?

What an incredibly dull approach to (other) life I’d say.

Blue tits.

My sister and brother-in-law kindly gave me a blue tit box for a birthday present a few years ago. With another mini camera inside! (I’m not obsessed or anything – honest guv!).

I nailed it to the back wall of the garden (a row of garages) and hoped that something would take a fancy to it. But nothing did for a couple of years.

Until this year.

Our hen run is located at the back of our large garden, next to this wall of lock-ups, and in April this year it became obvious to me, when letting our free range hens out each morning, that a pair of blue tits had become very interested in the tit box.

Long story short and my wife and I were treated to a constant live feed of blue tits nesting, piped into our conservatory control centre portable TV (where all my mini HD video cameras’ cables lead) – a real treat for us, as my wife wanted to see the inside of a blue tit nest ever since they first nested with us, when we moved back out of London into a two-up two-down rented house in the middle of Reading some seven or so years ago.

Our “wall blue tits” this year were up against it though. I had sited the box pretty poorly to be fair. Accessible for cats slinking along the lock-ups’ asbestos roofs behind the garden, and to squirrels, and to woodpeckers (I hadn’t put a metal plate around the entrance hole to deter these pretty, piebald predators).

So my April and May were spent erecting makeshift chicken wire predator fences along the garage roofs and shooing away any cats, squirrels and woodpeckers. I had to make “fence alterations” each night (as the local cats became quite determined to break my defences) and to be honest, after the 6 nestlings inside the box started to peep peep peeep noisily; I didn’t give them much hope.

I figured that eventually a cat would just sit by the box (or ON the box), the parents would abandon.... and that would be that.

The local male great spotted woodpecker was becoming determined too, with each day the nestlings grew and made more and more noise. I couldn’t watch the box all day of course (I was at work!), but I did my best to repair any damage done by his dagger like beak which was regularly hammering around the box.

I knew pretty-well exactly when the tits would fledge, if they made it that far. On the 22^nd or 23^rd May. (It’s always around 20 days for blue tits to fledge, from hatching).

And so it happened. On the evening (yes... evening) of the 22^nd May, five of the six tits all fledged in an hour, as dusk fell. I actually missed that moment as my wife and I were having our tea and I’d written off a fledge at that time of day.

But fledge they did, or all bar one anyway – leaving the smallest, runtiest nestling all alone in the box on the night of the 22^nd/23^rd May.

Now for many years I always thought of myself as a pretty stoic sort of person, especially where wildlife was concerned. I sigh each time Simon King (or whoever) chooses to give names to animals or birds that they film. The constant anthropomorphising of animals (often by TV conservationists) makes me quiver with shame and I’ve always rejected that path to arouse a nascent curiosity towards wildlife in others or young,  perhaps budding biologists.

But this tiny blue tit, all alone in the box, did pull at my heart strings.

Its brothers and sisters had gone. All it had known for the last twenty days was a small, dark box, with a round hole of daylight ahead, surrounded by 5 other blue tits and being visited by its parents with food.

Suddenly it was alone. No siblings around. No visits from the parents. In fact, no sign nor sound of other tits, parents or siblings.

I started to wonder what (if anything) was going on in its mind. Do blue tits have a “mind”. Or is everything instinctive?

I watched it for a good two hours in the box that night and hoped the parents would return at dawn the next morning, to lure it out of its shelter with the offer of a tempting caterpillar.

The next morning came and I needn’t have worried.

Back came a parent and the last blue tit, the smallest, least developed blue tit hopped out of the box into a small bush nearby. It clearly had trouble flying and I watched as it fluttered around on the ground – tiny and pretty helpless still.

When the runty fledgling fluttered into our chicken run I had to act quickly. I try not to “play god” with wildlife, but our hens are hardly natural British predators (they’re jungle fowl originally after all) and rushed into the run to rescue the tit. If I hadn’t have acted that way, our hens would have CERTAINLY pounced on the poor thing and torn it apart – they’re like bleedin’ dinosaurs, hens – and will happily wolf down frogs, mice and small birds (as well as every single insect they can).

The tiny tit, not much bigger than a squash ball sat on my index finger and I popped it on a high branch of a cherry tree. I retreated and hoped the parents would hear it and still feed it. They did of course, and it wasn’t much longer before the little runty fledgling had hopped onto the garage roofs and out of sight.

Later that day I was keen to know what had happened to it and its siblings and spent a lot of time in the garden listening for them and watching trees and bushes. I know very well that day old fledglings don’t tend to go too far (they still need to be fed by their parents as well as practice flying – and do both quite noisily).

I was absolutely delighted to see all six fledglings, including the runt, fly back into and around the garden and be fed by both parents – something I’d been quite worried about – I hadn’t seen nor heard the young for almost a day.

I never thought I would have reacted that way – with such delight (and something akin to pride I think) at the sight of these little, yellow balls of fluff peep peep peeping around our garden. Maybe parenthood has changed my outlook on such things? Perhaps.

A week has passed since the runt fledged and I’ve seen them once or twice since. Not six young any more (I guess a few succumb to magpies or cats etc) but it still delights me to see them back. I think I’ve become a big softy!

It’s very different with swifts (I know much more about swifts nesting behaviour than blue tits, strange though that may sound as everyone seems to have been watching blue tits nest for years now).

Swifts get their young to fledge by leaving them in the nest for a day (no food visits at all), returning at dusk, completely ignoring the insistent squeaking and wing fluttering of the young, whereby the young birds get the idea pretty quickly and leap out of the nest.

This is a HUGE leap for them though. Much more than passerines (perching birds). When a young swift takes its first leap from the nest, it has to learn to fly, eat and bathe in the air, all alone. There is NO parental care at all. No mother to feed it. No father to guide it back to sub Saharan Africa for the winter. It must find its own way there. They’re little machines, swifts. Which makes them all the more fascinating for me.

But there’s no chance for any “emotion”. The adults return. Ignore the young. The young leave and that’s that. They’re gone. For perhaps two or three years of CONSTANT flight. If they are lucky and survive that long (2-3 years) they should find their way (ALONE) back to the nest site in which they were born, and they MIGHT then bump into any of their siblings and perhaps much older parents. But that’s that. Quite incredible.

Tits on the other hand – well.... yes, our box of blue tits this year were very different, took a lot of effort from me and are probably still causing the adults a lot of effort!

A real privilege (again) to watch. At least for me and my wife.

Now of course through all of this... all of the starlings’ successes and ultimately sad failure, through the blue tits' trials and tribs, through the constant frustrations of attracting swifts to our house - I could have watched TV instead.

"Man vs Food" maybe.

Or "Celebrities do cake baking". Or "knitting". Or "falling off a diving board".

Or "Strictly Pop factor on ice got talent (get me out of here)".

Or another maverick cop bucking the bent system in downtown Philly.

ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.....

There really is no comparison is there, grapple fans?

Footnote.

Thanks to Mike and all at Handykam for providing me with all my min HD video cameras over the past few years.