Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Watching the bırdies!
Last year a bird-box camera gave Max Hastings his own TV wildlife show – so would a new brood of blue tits provide a thrilling sequel this summer?
We were not big TVwatchers in our household – until the amazing day that we started living our own wildlife reality show. We now sit hour after hour, preening ourselves before the screen, discussing how much better we do it than poor old David Attenborough.
Well, maybe that is a little unfair. The key roles in our own series are played not by human hands but instead by a family of blue tits, whose privacy we invade in a fashion that would make Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook feel squeamish. We have a camera and microphone in their bedroom/ lying-in-suite/crèche that records every flutter of tiny wings. I can now tell you more about the domestic habits of those little birds than about my own children’s.
It all started more than two years ago when my sister, the most imaginative present- giver we know, presented me with a bird-box camera system as a 70 th-birthday gesture. We took it home, pored over the wiring diagram with a little assistance from our favourite geek, and set about installation.
Siting the box thoughtfully is an important first step: birds like a clear flightpath, at the safest possible distance from cats and other predators who regard tits as hors d’oeuvres. We placed our new acquisition high on the sheltered rear wall of a garage building, with a power point to hand, 30 yards from the wireless signal receiver box, behind our TV in the kitchen.
My sister claims a 100 per cent success record, having entertained a clutch of eggs, then a family of fledglings every season since she installed her own box. But as readers of the Mail might know, our own first year, by contrast, was a disappointment. I wrote about how, for weeks in March and April, we stared hopefully at the image of the inside of our Ai rbnb, listening to the unvarying sound from its microphone, like that of waves breaking on a distant shore.
The most frustrating part was that every few days a bird would inspect the proper ty; hop around; tap the walls like a mortgage surveyor; then sniff, turn up its beak and vanish. Even more humiliating, one small caller got as far as bringing in some furniture – or rather, depos- it ing moss and straw – before decamping, never to be seen again.
What were we doing wrong? Did the people down the road whisper something to put them off us as landlords? Was the box in the wrong place? Or had they discovered a problem with the drains? The sense of rejection was painful. We knew how spurned lovers feel, or people who acquire buy- to-let properties, then cannot keep tenants.
Our neighbour, who has had garden boxes for years, calmed us down. Birds often start nests in two or three places before settling on a final choice, he said. The male tit does the initial house-hunting, then summons his mate to inspect and approve it – as sometimes she does not, which probably happened in our case. Next year would be completely different: it would all happen. He proved magically right. One mor n ing late in March, we switched on the box camera just in time to see our first tenant take up residence. She – apparently the female does the furnishing and subsequent DIY work – star ted carting in scraps of garden foliage, darting to and fro with manic energy until the bottom of the box vanished beneath a soft, inviting cushion of fluffy green stuff.
We learned more about the blue tit – Parus caeruleus as we twitchers call it – during the weeks that followed than I had previously acquired through a lifetime of shamefully unobservant country living. ‘During the courting period,’ I read aloud to my wife Penny from the bird book, ‘ the male sometimes seeks to impress the female by bringing her such delicacies as caterpillars.’ Hhmmph. That sounds cheaper than taking her out to dinner, I said, then returned to the book: ‘ Males are generally monogamous, though some have been recorded breeding with two females.’ Shame on them.
Nothing so improper took place in our family. For days, the expectant mother shifted the contents of the box about, with as much fussy, petulant zeal as any human newly-wed. She tapped noisily, manically on the wall, as if Black & Deckering it, then ducked and dived amid the lining.
Some patches of moss were pecked, scraped, f luttered upon, before being rejected and borne back into the garden. Penny said, ‘She has kept the receipts and is taking them back to the shop.’ We suffered moments of panic, that more stuff seemed to be going out than was coming in. Were we doomed to another disappointment?
But then she began that fascinating process which has yielded a proverb as old as time: she feathered her nest, lining a hole at its heart with soft down. One morning in the second week of April, we switched on the TV at breakfast to behold a single white, speckled egg. Through each day that followed, another was added, until there were... We argued about how many. Because Mother sought to hide them beneath feath-
‘Birds tapped the walls like mortgage surveyors’
ers through the daylight hours, it was hard to be sure.
Then she began to sit, to incubate them, and we tiptoed past the garage in terror of disturbing her. Human childbirth may not be much fun for mothers, but is surely less tiresome than sitting on top of a clutch of eggs for a fortnight without a book to read, a bloke to chat to, or a knitting pattern on the table.
Apparently the father merely hangs around the pub while all this is going on, sitting on a nearby branch supposedly protecting the nest, but doing little else to justify his existence. We refilled our garden bird-feeders even more enthusiastically than usual, and would have shooed away everybody except our expectant pair, had we possessed the faintest clue which ones they were. To all save the eyes of love, one blue tit looks amazingly like another.
Then came the thrilling morning when Penny rushed me down to the kitchen, turned on the TV and with possessive pride showed me a heap of creepy, slippery things, throbbing in the midst of the nesting box. We watched them, fascinated, through the hours and days that followed.
By bird or small mammal standards, our human lives are so protracted that it seemed almost literally unbelievable that within a mere three weeks, these tiny nestlings would be flying around the garden. Only after several days did it become apparent that nine of ten eggs had hatched – a tit can manage 13, so our nest was average.
TV wildlife programmes emphasise rarities, yet it is thought there may be three million breeding pairs of blue tits in Britain. Their colours are charming, yet too crude to please a fashion editor. Their behaviour suggests the cheeky chirpiness of old- fashioned stage cock- neys, though they are birds of the woodland, not the city. Yet these commonplace creatures can enchant such simple folk as the Hastingses.
It is the intimacy of the camera that makes their little domestic drama irresistible – the curious secret bond between Penny and I – huge alien creatures sitting in our kitchen – and the little birds whose every movement and peccadillo became familiar to us over the six weeks or so that we watched them.
Once the eggs hatched, the par- ents immediately embarked on the cycle which grew ever more manic through the next 19 days, to keep their progeny supplied with caterpillars. At first the little mouths could scarcely raise themselves to take in rations. With amazing speed, however, they got the idea, and soon spent most of the day in the default position of infants of every species – demanding more and more of whatever is going.
We felt curiously guilty to be intruding on intimate family life, almost whispering to each other lest the birds should hear us, though the audio feed goes only one way. It was thrilling to hear the first cheepings, then listen as these grew ever more strident.
As the fledglings got bigger and greedier, so the pressure upon the parents grew more relentless: it was as if the whole evolutionary process had been switched to fastforward. From one day to the next, feathers multiplied, so that in no time at all they looked ready for primary school. The mother for the first ten days kept diving deep i nto t he nest to retrieve their droppings and carry them out of the box. Latterly, this process was streamlined: the babies in turn presented their small bottoms to have their poos removed and carted out. As the bundles of ever-more vigorous life heaved and strained, it was painful to see the weaker siblings trampled underfoot. There was no mutual compassion, sympathy or interest in each other’s affairs or troubles, instead only a fixation to get whatever was held in the parents’ beaks, before their rival nestlings. I mused aloud: how does the mother know which is next in line? Mothers always know, said Penny wisely.
The hapless parents were hard at it when we came down to breakfast, and were still doing shuttle feeds at supper time. The young ones started to flap their winglets and claw up the walls of the box, boasting almost full feathers except for some bald patches.
We started to worry about the nas- ty shocks waiting for them outside, like thunderstorms, raptors and Boris Johnson. I doubt if their parents wasted much energy trying to warn them, however, because they would know that it is hopeless trying to tell one’s children anything: they must find out for themselves, the hard way.
The brood flew the nest one by one, over the space of three days. We agreed that the parents must have been sublimely grateful: at last a bit of time to themselves; a chance of a date night and supper in the pub. We, the spectators, felt instead a sense of anticlimax, which persisted through nine months that followed until lo – happy day – the whole cycle started again.
This year, we acquired our new tenants at Easter. We wonder, as do all nestbox owners, whether the same birds pay repeat visits. The odds are heavily against this, since tits live an average of just 1.5 years. Because they tend to stick around a territory, however, it is possible that our 2018 occupants are offspring of last year’s. We like to think so, anyway.
Our new TV star tit mother spent weeks sitting hard. But, probably because this spring was such a weather muddle, it seemed as if the big hat ching moment would never arrive. The birds do not start reproducing in earnest until they know that there is a sufficiency of moth caterpillars to feed the offspring.
Then suddenly, one morning this week we came down to breakfast and discovered that we are godparents again to five, six, seven – no, eight unimaginably tiny creatures. You might think we’d be rather blasé about it this time around, having seen it all before. But no, if anything it’s even more gripping as we wonder how our new surrogate family will fare before the chicks fly the nest.
We find ourselves gazing fascinated at the screen as the parents hurl themselves into the frenzied cycle of supply and demand. We have a magic window on creation, without needing even to quit the kitchen table. Much as we love him, who needs Attenborough?
‘From one day to the next, feathers multiplied’