The Naked Birdwatcher

Friends and followers of my Instagram account may have seen footage from our cctv enabled nestbox the last two seasons showing a family of bluetits nesting and eventually fledging said box.

  

Further to this they have also been treated to my 3d printing shenanigans including the birdfeeders you can see here.

  

 For those who may be interested you can get design files for all manner of stuff 3d print wise from thingiverse and hack/remake or design your own using tinkercad. This may sound terribly expensive and complicated but when you consider a 3d printer in kit form can be had new for under £100 and print model files themselves are for the most part open source and free..well it could almost be considered rude not to have a little dabble. My entire set up including the desk, chair, the 3d printer itself, the consumables (filament cleaner fluids wipes etc) and a couple of upgrades so it's less likely to burn my house down has so far amounted to less than £200..and that includes buying a half decent second hand desktop computer to dedicate to running it.

Now, my apologies for the somewhat clickbaity title however in my defence it is a technically true statement and if I hadn't thought of it just now this rather neglected blog probably wouldn't contain this entry. You see these feeders have seen very little action in the few months since I printed them. Aside from the odd pigeon attempting a landing and usually failing or myself banging my head on them more often than occasionally when I walk down the garden both resulting in birdseed spillage all over the patio I havent needed to refill them.   For some reason though, perhaps it's the weather or the time of year when we have lots of youngsters fledging the nests or maybe the bloke next door isn't filling his plethora of feeding stations up as much, the last week or so we have begun to notice birds taking more of an interest. This morning when I got up and was making my way downstairs to the shower (hence the naked part) I noticed loads of activity around the feeders. Not wanting to miss the opportunity I quickly grabbed my camera from the cupboard and started snapping the shots you see here through the backroom window.

	TITS!! lots of them.. ..and other birds Click thumbnails to enlarge...

Fortunately I was close enough not to get any unwanted reflections..or maybe that should be read unfortunately if you arrived here purely because of the title.