I was going to start off the week with a success story from the garden – we have a bird box on the wall, and there had been a flurry of activity with a Wren busy gathering up nesting material.

A couple of weeks ago, we spotted the adult Wren peeking out of the box (using a long lens on the camera, so we didn’t get close to the box), and it looked like there’d be some baby Wrens soon.

A week or two later, there was what appears to be a young Wren peeking out of the box, with what looked like a lovely spiked hairdo!

With the possibility of three baby Wrens (at least we thought we’d seen three beaks at one point – it’s hard to tell from a distance!), we were keeping a close eye out for any predators that were getting close to the garden. After all, providing a nest box made us feel rather responsible for the little ones!

Unfortunately, a Jay has braved the somewhat enclosed garden area where the box is, landing on the fence and even directly in front of the box itself. I can’t be certain if it managed to take any of the youngsters, but I have a feeling this won’t be the nice little success story I was hoping for.

I guess it proves that even in a man-made environment, these birds are preyed on by lots of larger birds, and it shows how much they have to go through to survive.