Black Restart Bird Nest in Our House – From Eggs to Fledglings

We have a room underneath our house that we use for storage. In this room you will find  tools, paints, boxes and more interestingly, a perfectly formed birds nest in the corner. We have a big old seat cushion from our campervan leant against the stone wall and, as it turns out, a certain little bird saw this as the ideal location to build her nest. I was only trying to find a paintbrush when I came across it – what a discovery!

We watched with curiosity as the little brown bird flew in and out of the front door, adding the finishing feathers to her perfectly shaped nest. She was a black redstart and our presence didn’t seem to annoy her.

Black redstarts are small in size, about 14cm in length. The males are dark grey in colour with a red tail, and our nesting female was grey brown. Black redstarts are monogamous and breed just once per year in Spring.

The nest was too high for us to look into properly, but we were eager to see the redstart’s journey to motherhood progress. We fixed our trail camera on a tall tripod in place and waited patiently. There was one egg… then two… three… and four was our final count. She had laid one egg a day for four days.  The eggs were tiny and bright white!

Our little bird then nestled into position, incubating her eggs. She remained here for around two weeks, only leaving for short periods to eat. We watched her return to the nest and swallow down some insects.

Eventually the eggs hatched, and the mother redstart now had four baby mouths to feed. The freshly hatched birds nearly look alien like with their hungry mouths wide open. The redstart worked hard to look after her hatchlings, constantly flying in and out with food for them, dropping it into their little mouths. Something we hadn't seen before was the baby bird fecal sacs or ‘bird diapers’. The baby birds deposited small white sacs of waste after they ate, which the mother bird took away, keeping the nest clean and tidy. 16 days later the four young birds fledged the nest.  

It was an absolute joy and pleasure to observe this process. We wouldn’t say we were particularly ornithophiles, but watching nature unfold right beside our home was spectacular! It is fascinating to learn about all that is going on around us and we feel more connected to nature than ever before.