…is never easy but I don’t think we often realise how tough it really is for wildlife.  

It’s been a busy spring, actually pretty cold in the UK after a mild winter. I’d hoped this post would be a bit of a record of a small project I was aiming to complete during the spring.  

One of the things I’d hoped to do this spring is photograph a long tailed tit nest.  This is partly because many years ago (in the age of SLRs and slow slide film) I’d attempted to do this at a nest on heathland.  The results had not been great because these are devilishly small birds and nest in, usually, really well concealed nests.  But the nests are fantastic.  They are intricately built small balls lined with feathers and down and carefully concealed with lichen and other vegetation.  

As I’d seen a nest years ago in gorse and because I’ve seen at least two more in similar large bushes in the autumn and winter I though it should be reasonably easy to track down another.  After a few weeks of looking at nearly every decent sized gorse bush in the area (about a square mile or two) I realised this wasn’t going to be so easy.  Explaining to my wife what I was looking for while out walking the dog, I showed her an old nest I’d seen last autumn in a bush just off a path.  Only to realise that it was probably occupied because it looked much neater than I’d remembered.  We hastily beat a retreat.   

I then spent the best part of a day looking at it from a distance through binoculars.  The nest was occupied and, more to the point, it was actually possible to see the nest and the access hole from one particular line.  I wasn’t sure that the birds were yet feeding young so I very carefully set up and gradually moved in a temporary hide undercover of other bushes and then when it was clear the birds were not concerned by the change in the bush I took a few photos.

A handful of photos later I could see that the pair were still setting up the nest and probably were nearing laying.  This is a particularly critical time and I really didn’t want to cause any disturbance so I decided to leave things well alone for a couple of weeks or so until I was sure the pair were feeding young and fully busy.  It’s pretty clear when this is happening as traffic to the nest for these small insect eaters gets very busy and frequent.  

Over the following 10 days I’ve been keeping an occasional eye on things from a distance and it looked like the pair may have laid eggs and were incubating.  Yesterday morning, I went back and from about 25m through binoculars, I could see something was wrong.  The nest’s entry hole looked much larger.  It soon became apparent that the nest had been raided and the top of the nest hole had been pulled up from above.  My guess is that it was another bird that had predated the eggs.  

So, that was it for this nest. Perhaps it really was too easy to spot (perhaps easier from above),  Though, one might have thought that the armoured spines of the gorse gave sufficient protection.  I hope the pair made it away safely. It was early enough in the year that they may be able to restart and raise a brood.  But I haven’t seen any return to this particular nest since. On the plus side, I think the mild winter here means that population of long tailed tits around here is strong.  There certainly seem to be a good number around this year.   

For my part, it brought home the slim line between success or failure for these animals.  I suspect I’ll be lucky to find another nest to photograph.  I’ll be spending more time looking carefully round all the remaining gorse bushes.  

As a footnote… Please take the utmost care in watching or even considering photographing birds at a nest.  It takes time, patience and great care.  It is highly irresponsible to to expose a nest to make it easier to photograph because it opens the nest to predation.  As this experience shows, they are vulnerable enough to predation as it is.