The circle of life (for Pied Flycatchers)

It was an early start for the flycatchers this year with the first female being caught on the 17th April and the first egg laid on 29th April (a few days earlier than last year).

Pied flyctachers normally lay 7 eggs but in poor years they will lay 6 and in good years they will lay 8 or 9. We had a record of 10 eggs found in one nest this year suggesting that the Pied flycatchers thought it would be a very good year.

Once the eggs had been laid (one a day) the females starting incubating them, keeping them warm and dry to allow the chicks inside to grow. Here we recorded footage of the incubating by placing a camera in the top of the nestbox so that we could record the activity patterns. All our interactions with the birds are under licence (with the BTO) and conducted in order to understand their behaviour and patterns better so that we can help conserve the species more effectively.

After two weeks of incubating the flycatcher chicks started hatching. They tend to hatch over the course of one or two days. This means that they are a similar age and size so that one doesn’t take all the food from the others! Here are some healthy new born chicks who hatched earlier that day. They’ll be in the nest growing for the next two weeks

These chicks quickly develop, grown their skeleton and start growing feathers to keep themselves warm whilst the parents look for food.

By day 7 - 10 they are ready to have a metal ring attached around their leg to allow us to identify which individual is which and calculate survival rates when we catch the same individual multiple times. The fact that we do catch the same individuals many times shows that the interactions are not detrimental to the birds and they can successfully raise their young and complete their migrations.

Then by day 14 they are ready to leave the nest and start exploring the woodland around them! Shortly after they become very quite and we don’t see them until they appear back next year ready to breed and help raise their own family

Here’s one such female who has returned to the woods over three times to have a family. She is (I’m sure) very proud to raise her Welsh offspring!

We’re very much looking forward to seeing her next year and very grateful to all the funding raised by running stats courses which allows us to manage the woodland, buy the nest boxes and fund our time to collect and analyse these data.

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