Monday, 2 May 2011

le Nid de la Mésange Charbonnière

One of the items in our garden is a terracotta urn made by someone Susan knew back in her Queensland days. It has been seen on the blog in various photos over the past couple of years.

Last week we were having dinner on the apéro terrasse (as you do) when I said to Susan "I am sure I just saw a sparrow fly into the urn". I wasn't sure: it seemed like such an improbable idea.

It wasn't a sparrow, it was a great tit, and it's a pair with a nest in which the chicks have already hatched. Some careful staking out of the back garden produced this evidence:

It's difficult to say for sure, but I think this is
the female returning to the nest with a caterpillar

Into the urn (after a lot of pretending that
wasn't its destination)

and out again with a faecal sac

Simon

4 comments:

GaynorB said...

Brilliant detective work!

Simon said...

That's what it was - I was supposed to be washing the Maigret car at the time...

Craig said...

Well done you in capturing it all so well on camera!

Tim said...

Nice set, I hope that the urn has no bottom.... else, when it does rain here, they'll get flooded out [or is there some shelter to that funnel shaped neck that isn't showing in the close-up photos.
I think this may well be the male... the black down the front looks as though it extends all the way to the vent [arse]... on the lady it don't!

WV is "sloba".... which is probably what the chicks did when they saw that caterpillar.

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