Parus major Camera Obscura

For  while I was puzzling over the Great Tits. It seemed like only one parent was feeding them - you could tell because it was ringed. But after trawling through my recent footage, the obvious answer became obvious - they're both ringed. Both birds are fairly similar in features, with very little to tell them apart. The v short clip below is a mash-up for comparison. It's still not easy due to my poor placement of the camera, but you'll notice that one bird ( the male) is slightly brighter yellow, with a complete black neckring - and a right hind claw that is clipped for some reason.

Meanwhile, inside the trough, the nestlings have changed completely from the naked blind wrigglers seven days ago. Sadly, one hatchling had wandered out of the nest somehow, and lay dead on the earth. There is a chance that one of the adults had tried to remove this casualty and couldn't quite manage it, but either way the curious thing was that it had been dead for nearly a week, seemingly, but apart from being stone cold, it looked very fresh with no decomposition and just a slight 'sunken eyed' look to it. I suppose it may have been very late to emerge from the egg - there were two that hadn't hatched when I checked a week ago, but even so - very strange. It made me wonder if there's an evolutionary thing going on - because it would definitely be an advantage to not go rancid too quickly for the rest of the clutch.

With the adults showing no stress over my meddling, I thought it might be an idea to try to get some real close-up footage from inside the nest. It's not every nestbox you can just shove an SLR into, so it must be worth a try, I thought. Light being an obvious issue, I strapped on my headtorch but it didn't seem to have any effect. A-ha! put the torch on the camera instead. boom! Sorry. yeah - still didn't make much difference.

After that first attempt it was pretty obvious I was zoomed in too tight, and pulling back helped with the lighting issues as well. Wait for the call.......