Quantock Hills. An Area of Outstanding Beauty

Distinguishing between blue and great tit nests isn’t always easy but some clues can help.  Quite often blue tits cover up their eggs when leaving the nest to forage for food and their eggs can be less speckled and slightly smaller.  Occasionally we find an adult bird sitting in the nest incubating the eggs and then we can obviously correctly identify the nest owner.  Failing that we shall be ringing the young when old enough and this again will allow us to ID the birds.

It’s worth mentioning that Jen and I are following strict guidelines and methodology provided by the British Trust for Ornithology and every care is taken to ensure disturbance is not a problem.

A quick up date on the pied flycatchers situation is that we have recorded nest being built and some are completed but as yet no eggs.

Bright eyed and bushy tailed

As previous blogs have mentioned we’re busy monitoring our bird nest boxes but we also have a number of boxes specifically put up for mammals.  The mammals we are interested in are Dormice and Shelley ( one of our Volunteers) is licensed by Natural England to handle them as part of an official monitoring scheme.

Dormice hibernate over the winter months only being stirred into action once the last frosts are over and spring begins.  Although Dormice hibernate at ground level they actually lead an arboreal life foraging amongst the tree canopies.  Dormice are easily identified by their bushy tail, orange/brown pelage, large ears and dark black eyes making them look very cute.

Beginning last week and running through to October we shall be recording what we find in the nest boxed towards the end of each month.  This is the first year we’ve undertaken this research and we were not expecting to find much except the odd bird nest but to our surprise we came across 16 boxes (out of 50) with blue or great tits occupying them.  But then to our absolute amazement we found an individual dormouse which was then carefully handled to weigh it and identify whether it was male or female.  At just 15g this female was probably a juvenile but had done well to come through the winter and hopefully is a good sign of a healthy population.

We shall keep you posted on how things go