What a magical time this is, as we transition from Winter to Spring. In the last few days we have seen barn owls foraging, red kites on the nest, blackbirds and thrushes singing their hearts out and a pair of blue tits hurtling through the treetops in full flirtation.
The red kite will be laying eggs now and it will take thirty days for these to hatch. The chicks will be fully fledged after a further fifty days but usually stay around the nest for twenty more days. This means that the adult birds spend over one hundred days nesting!
The barn owl will also be sitting on eggs now. Unusually there can be up to three weeks delay between the first and last eggs being laid. The chicks hatch over a similar period, which reduces the demand for food and spreads it over a longer period.
The family flocks of long tailed tits have now broken up and the pairs are established. Now they start on a three-to-four-week marathon building their extraordinary and beautiful nests. Constructed of moss, lined with thousands of feathers, bound together with spider’s web. The female will then lay up to ten eggs. Each egg is not much bigger than a peanut and weighs less than a paperclip! Other sightings of the month have included a large egret, mandarin ducks, starlings, and gadwall, while Peter has a noisy flock of siskins in his garden.
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