Apple Blossom Time

It's a cool and overcast morning here in Tottenham, North London, with the promise of rain later (just when we plan to go to the allotment, of course), but the apple blossom in our garden is booping merrily along....



(Judith just visible in the conservatory behind the tree, doubtless engaged in some important post-breakfast numberwangs.)

A Visit to Kew Gardens

Today is grey and damp, with the weekend promising more of the same and the temperatures trending downwards (chiz chiz as N Molesworth the goriller of form 3B would sa). But yesterday, when it was mostly fine and occasionally sunny, The Wugster and I went to Kew Gardens, for which she has purchased an annual pass allowing her and one guest an unlimited number of visits; four such visits, and the pass has paid for itself (especially as ticket prices may have to rise to make up some of the continuing cuts in government funding). (Which of course government spokescreatures claim are not actually cuts at all.)

The Wugster was interested primarily in the displays of azaleas and rhododendrons, which are currently in or coming into bloom; I was interested primarily in photographing things, and doing a spot of birdwatching in between: Emirates Airlines Airbus A380, Malaysian Airlines short 747, numerous British Airways 737 and 767 variants, and so on....because Kew Gardens is directly under the approach path to Heathrow Airport, and it seems that crossing the garden boundary is the signal to the pilots to lower the aircrafts' landing gear: you can see the wheel wells open and the undercarriage extend, and hear the pitch of the engines rise as the pilots have to increase thrust to compensate for the extra drag. Hours of fun, for those who might be interested in such things.

Anyway, here are some photographs of the azaleas, together with a photograph of The Wugster taking a photograph of some rhododendrons. Then we strolled to the end of Syon Vista, walked along the lake photographing coots and coot chicks, and went up the treetop walkway before exiting via the gift shop where one or two new plants for the garden were acquired.

The Chicks Have Fledged!

I was making my breakfast coffee just before 8.00am this morning when I noticed a sudden flurry outside the kitchen door: a new bird had appeared on the shelf above the nest. It was a speckled brown colour, with a yellow beak and tufts of down above its eyes: the first chick had fledged!

It had gone in the minute it took me to get my camera; but it took almost an hour before its nest-mates followed. One chick climbed out of the nest onto the gardening clutter immediately adjacent, but then sat there for some time while the parent birds brought food for the other two....at which point, perhaps realising that the parents weren't giving it anything, the chick clambered back into the nest. One of the other two chicks subsequently clambered out of the nest in the other direction, promptly falling into the gap between two sprayer bottles, and had to clamber back. All three then took turns to stand on the edge of the nest, flexing their wings, until just after 9.00am when -- one after the other -- they decided it was time to go. But they didn't go very far: they left the nest, but then took up positions on various adjacent spots -- the rim of the shredder, the lid of the worm compost bin, a stack of flower pots on a shelf, a curl of hose outside the kitchen window, the handle of a spade....this was the big wide world, but what were they making of it?

At this point, however, with all the chicks out of the nest, the parent birds' behaviour changed -- they would fly in with food in their beaks, but largely to show it to the chicks to tempt them to travel further. But these three, unlike the first to leave, were very reluctant. For the next couple of hours, while we had a late breakfast and kept watch, all three remained in our side passage, with the parents feeding them occasionally but mainly trying to encourage them to move out into the garden. Two of them eventually did so, but the third seemed very reluctant, almost trying to hide itself away -- between the rear of a window box and the glass of the dining window, behind a collection of plastic saucers for plant pots, under the worm compost bin....at one point, it flew down into a bag of garden sand, requiring me to go out and rescue it. Finally, sometime after midday, the chick got up its courage, flew out from under the glass roof of the side passage and up onto the roof of next door's rear extension, where one of its parents rushed to greet it with a beakful of choice morsels. Next thing we knew, they were all gone, parents and chicks together.

The garden is empty of robins now but, before they left and while they were still encouraging the chicks, the parent birds went into what looked a lot like a courtship display, with the female atop the wooden arch in the garden cheeping furiously and the male flying around with a worm in its beak. Did they mate again before they left? It is the male alone who takes responsibility for feeding the chicks after they've fledged, while the female concentrates on feeding herself up to be ready for the second clutch of eggs normally laid each year; if they did mate, will the female return to re-use the nest outside the kitchen door?

We may (or may not) know in a few weeks' time. Until then, here are some pictures of this morning's fledging excitement.

Robin Chicks Update

We noticed last weekend that the female robin had ceased mothering the chicks overnight; since then, unless she's bringing in food for the chicks and removing their faecal sacs, she's not spending any time at the nest at all. We speculate that this may be attributable to the parasites which the chicks have acquired from the nesting materials, a speculation reinforced by the time spent by the female preening herself last weekend: perched in the apple trees outside the conservatory, she would work methodically through her wing feathers, under her wings and down her breast, clearly removing (and eating!) ticks and mites. (Leaving the chicks alone in the nest overnight may also be a simple survival strategy: if a predator gets the chicks, the parents will live to breed again; conversely, if one of the parents is taken out, the other will be able to continue feeding the chicks.)

There has also been a change in the robins' behaviour around us. On the one hand, they now clearly associate the provision of mealworms with us, even to the extent of anticipating my appearance in the garden at 6.00am to replenish the feeders (an open tray on a pole and a ground tray in a cage on the lawn) -- I barely get back inside the house before both parents are stuffing their beaks with provender (in the case of the open tray, because they have to get some in before the bigger starlings arrive and scare them off -- the ground tray is newer, and it took the robins a few days to recognise its existence....although they have to compete for the feed therein with a pair of great tits, flying in from a neighbouring garden). On the other hand, they respond quite differently if they think we might be threatening the chicks. Robins are famously tolerant of human proximity; were that not the case, the female would never have built the nest so close to our kitchen door. Although we currently use that door as little as possible to avoid disturbing the chicks, there are occasions when we need to open it to add stuff to the worm bin; the noise of this immediately prompts the female to fly in and take up what looks very like a "guard-attack" position on an adjacent shelf until we've closed the door and she can resume her food-gathering duties.

The chicks have also been growing fast. Below are three photographs, taken (respectively) on Monday, Friday and today (Sunday), showing their development -- from the tip of a beak poking above the rim of the nest to juveniles within a few days of fledging. What the photographs don't show is how active they've become: they have been generally inert and huddled down in the nest when the parent birds aren't there with food for them, but at other times have begun to raise themselves in the nest, stretch out their necks and exercise their flight muscles. This activity is the reason for the slight blurriness of the third photograph: the chick at the back looks larger than the others, but that's because it's pushed itself up in the nest and a few seconds later was scrambling over the others to take up a new position at the front. Fledging must be imminent....

A Much Better Photograph of the Robin Chicks

I can't imagine why I didn't use this one instead of that attached to the previous post. Perhaps I just wanted to spam you with robin photographs....

Robin Transactions

Yesterday (Saturday) we caught our first glimpses of the chicks in the nest; and this weekend marked a change in the parent birds' feeding behaviour.

The chicks are just visible (if one knows what to look for) above the rim of the nest as fluffy dark bundles which wobble about a bit -- at less than a week old, they are clearly very unsteady on their feet. When a parent flies in with some food, all rise up, their yellow beaks agape; we count four of them. They're very difficult to photograph, both because they keep crashing into one another and because they're partly screened by the parent bird; but below is the best of the many photographs (all the rest even more blurred or out-of-focus) that I took. We also saw, for the very first time, the female bird carry away a faecal sac -- a soft white pellet -- from one of the chicks, which perhaps suggests that (contrary to my previous robin post) she hadn't been eating them after all.



As to feeding: hitherto, the female has spent the bulk of her time on the nest, receiving food from the male for both herself and the chicks; this behaviour was so ingrained that on the rare occasions that the female had left the nest the male bird would usually await her return -- perched on the plant hanging bracket outside the kitchen door or on the shelf above the nest -- rather than deliver his beakfuls of grubs and small worms directly to the chicks. But sometime on Saturday, that changed: the female started leaving the nest to forage for both herself and the chicks for longer and longer periods, until by the end of the day she -- like the male -- was visiting the nest solely to feed the chicks. She was still active until very late, not returning to sit on the chicks until it was almost fully dark.

Today has been rather less mild, and more windy, than the past couple of days; both birds have nevertheless been active foragers, in our garden -- it's notable that there are particular patches of bare soil they like to investigate -- and (presumably) others. (The two gardens either side of ours are not particularly kempt, and so are doubtless thronged with small invertebrates.) Below is a photograph of the female robin, sunning herself in the fresh air on Saturday.

Some Close-Ups of Mrs Robin

Taken this afternoon with 30x and 38x digital zoom, using the top rung of a step-ladder to keep the camera steady. The female is definitely sitting higher in the nest, as to be expected when she has a clutch of chicks under her; she raises herself from time to time to look down at them, and occasionally thrusts her head down to pick up something which she then appears to eat; the likeliest item, disgusting as it sounds, must be the chicks' faecal sacs. Presumably it's all protein....

Robination

I haven't been keeping you up-to-date on the robins.

There were several moments of near excitement around breakfast on Friday: both robins were out and about in the garden, and then both flew in under the glass roof of the side passage, the male to take up a position on a plant hanger outside the kitchen door while the female perched on the edge of the nest, looking down into it as though expecting something to happen. Were we about to witness the first chick(s) hatching out? It seemed not: after a couple of minutes, the female resumed her place in the nest -- but the male stayed, which was not his normal behaviour: up to then, he had merely delivered food for the female, but then flew off to spend the day elsewhere. Presumably this new "guarding" behaviour was a cued response to something happening inside the eggs: a change in their smell, perhaps? The gentle tapping of a beak from within the shell? Even a faint cheep?

The weekend was quiet. Then, late yesterday morning, there was a flurry of robin activity, with the female bobbing up and down on the nest and the male flying in to take up "guard" positions around her. This went on for some time, with both of them repeating Friday's action of standing on the edge of the nest looking down into it; there would then be a lull, with the female settling down again and the male flying off to (presumably) forage for insects.

Around 12.30, however, the female seemed to have lifted herself in the nest, and was poking her head down into it -- checking on an egg? Listening for sounds? Helping a chick to be born? Perhaps all three; then her head came back up with a large piece of shell in her beak, which she then swallowed (clearly to help replace the calcium lost to make the egg in the first place). Then the male was back, with a beakful of insect grubs -- the female tilted her head back and opened her beak, evidently expecting that they were for her, but the male ignored her; he was looking past her, down into the nest itself. She moved aside, and he leaned down to give the newly-hatched chick, still invisible to us in the depths off the nest, its first meal.

This behaviour, with the female raising herself in the nest to look down at its contents and the male flying in with food, continued for the next few hours. We only saw one other instance of eggshell consumption by the female, around 1.30pm, so we either missed all the others (and therefore don't know exactly how many chicks are in the nest -- four to six eggs is the normal clutch size) or what we saw was the hatching of the first pair of eggs, laid on Friday 14 March, with the rest to hatch today and tomorrow. However, there have been no further signs of chicks hatching, so they must all have hatched yesterday. Both parents have been actively gathering insect provender for them, although the female spends more time on the nest, doubtless to keep the chicks warm -- they are born naked, according to the RSPB, but start to develop feathers three days later. This means that the male is also bringing in food for the female, who eats some of it but also passes it down into the nest to the chicks.

Below is a selection of photographs from yesterday and today, showing the male perched on a pant hanger outside the kitchen door; the male passing a grub to the female; a close-up of the female on the nest; and the female feeding the chicks. The fourth is not the clearest, but if you look carefully below the female (click on the image to open it, enlarged, in a new window) the rhomboid shape of an open beak and the white tuft above it that guides the parent bird in are just visible.