The Great tits laid their first egg last night, the female will lay a number of eggs before beginning incubation.

The House martins are doing their best to disturb the view of their nest by continuing to wall up the entrance!

And finally the Barn Owls continue to grow and get more hungry.  Both parents are now out hunting most of the time to feed them, even the younger two are growing quickly, fingers crossed all 5 make it to fledge this year

I have finally managed to get the nest camera onto the Gable end of the Warden's Office looking into the House Martin nest.  They were back in to investigate within a minute of me moving away!  They are still repairing the nest after part of it fell down during the winter, I shall post some videos of the repair work shortly.

The Great tit nest camera is in and running, they are busy setting up their nest here, I'm not quite sure they've got the hang of food transfer yet though!

I haven't shown anything of the male yet and he's been doing a great job keeping them all fed, hunting day and night.  This is one of the only occasions I can find where the female has let him stay in the box, normally she snatches food and throws him out straight away to catch something else! (he only managed 3 minutes before out staying him welcome though!)

The colour camera is back in the Barn owl box with live feeds to the office.  there are actually 5 chicks although the smallest is barely any bigger than the oldest chicks head!  The crosses that keep appearing are part of the recording software's motion tracking tool, I now know how to turn these off for future recordings!

Tomorrow's job will be installing cameras on the Great tit and House martin nests, so keep watching for video posts from those.

We are running with a temporary camera, temporary wiring and temporary software so my apologies for the quality.  I have ordered better cameras and servers so expect improved updates very soon.
In the mean time I shall post regular videos to YouTube.

This regular breeding pair have 4 chicks with quite a large size range, the female is still spending most of her time in the box, only leaving for short periods in the evening and just before dawn.  The male is bringing regular food drops which consist mostly of field mice with the odd vole.

It has taken a lot of messing around with cables and power but I finally have the first of our planned nest box camera feeds back in my office!  A family of Barn owls with 4 chicks.  Still on temporary equipment and resulting low quality but it is already giving us a huge insight into the lives of the breeding pair  here.  we are now easily able to see what the male is bringing and how weather conditions affect his hunting, and also the surprising intolerance the female shows to having him in the box rather than out hunting!  I hope to show videos very soon.

We have further plans for nest box cameras in the existing barn owl boxes, Tawny owl boxes, Shelduck nest chambers (underground) Swift boxes, Blue tit and Robin boxes.  In the future I hope we can get feeds from the Sand martin and Kingfisher nests as well as our reed bed dwellers maybe