In March I put a nest box a little bit over the bird feeder that you have already seen in the past.
Plan was to put a USB camera inside, unfortunately, because of messy combination of hardware/software/cable problems I had to put the plan temporarily on hold. But, as the nest box is about 2 meters from my desk, I hoped for a nice view of birds raising their young.
Unfortunately, so far even that part didn't work as expected.
In the end of April a pair of chickadees started to build a nest inside:
They looked quite happy, even if there were moments when they were looking at me with a serious resentment "you could make this hole larger, couldn't you?" (well, I could, but I made it small in a hope the box will get occupied by blue tits).
Unfortunately, they disappeared and as of today I have not seen them for well over two weeks. Nest box is in such a place I can see it when sitting at my desk, just on the border of my field view, so I am sure they abandoned the nest - it is impossible to miss motion there. So I decided to open the box and see what is going on inside.
Turns out they build a nice nest - while it is not well visible on the picture, it is well over 4" of sticks and moss, lined with dog hair.
They also laid eggs - 8 of them but I lost 3 while trying to pick the nest from the box, so only 5 on the picture:
Broken eggs contained only white and yolk, so probably the nest was abandoned soon after they were laid, I presume otherwise there should be some embryos visible. That fits my observations - they disappeared soon after they stopped to bring building materials.
Somehow this year so far almost nothing goes as planned [PLAIN]http://www.bpp.com.pl/IMG/grumpy_borek.png[/QUOTE]:cry: How sad.
