I have this evening opened up the box and removed the nest and dead chicks. There where also a couple of unhatched eggs.
I have used boiling water to clean the box and birdcam is now broadcasting again, although now obviously the box is empty.
Fingers crossed for a second set of chicks this year but I feel it will be a slim chance.
As of 2pm today it appears that all the chicks have died.
The chicks became quieter and quieter and mum was spending less and less time in the box looking after them.
It may be that the dad has died and therefore wasn’t able to support the family with food or it may be that there weren’t enough caterpillars at this time of year.
Thanks for everyone who stayed tuned, we will be back next year with hopefully better results.
The chicks are now starting to muscle each other around to get attention and to have some space to spread their wings!
They’ve come on so much since they hatched a week ago.
Looks like mum has even more to do to keep them all in line!
See how the chick fights its way up onto its mother……bless!
The latest video shows a caterpillar making a bid for freedom as mum and dad have missed feeding him to the chicks!
Since going live on the 12 of February 2008 we’ve had 2273 unique people visit the site creating 12949 hits.
I’ve posted 50 blog postings and the birdcam has captured 20,000 video clips totaling 16GB worth of disk space!
Thank you all for your support, especially those who have donated towards the hosting costs.
You can use the video archive link to see all of the videos captured, not just the ones that I publish to youtube but beware that I am geting about a 1000 new ones each day at the moment!
The below video clip shows how the mother deal with the chicks who want a no.2!
We seem to have 6 chicks although as you can see the nest activity is quite frantic and you have to guess when the mouths are open.
Not all of the chicks seem to open their mouths everytime the parents return to the nest which makes it even harder to tell!
Some users have reported that they are having trouble viewing the videos.
These tend to be youtube issues so either try going direct to youtube or try again later, sorry guys.
You get quite a good view at the size of the chick in this particular clip. One thing that I’ll research for next year is a better camera where I can maybe remotely adjust the focus. I manually set the focus when I built the bird box using a tape measure as “a bird” and focused it to look clear!