Hooray the robins in our garden have successfully fledged!! Two juvenile robins have been flitting around our garden all week, with the parents never very far away. They may be able to fly, but they still seem determined to sponge off Mum & Dad (typical teenagers) for as long as possible. So I’ve spent the week chasing them around the garden trying to get the perfect shot of them being fed by the doting parents. The results were mixed to say the least – if I got a perfectly focussed photo then they weren’t doing anything very interesting. If they started feeding the chicks, then in my excitement the photos came out blurred!

The adults were as always pretty easy to photograph – they seem to love the camera and pose happily on any available perch.

They’ve always taken a keen interest in whatever was out on the bird table and of late I’d seen them flying off with their bounty rather than eating it there and then, so I’d suspected chicks might have hatched. We’ve never spotted the robin nest, so perhaps they’re nesting in one of the neighbours gardens and just using us as a buffet?

The fledglings appeared a week or so ago. Initially they were shy, keeping to the bushes, but have gradually got bolder. At first I thought it was just one – perhaps one fledged before the other. The one below looks particularly dejected as if it’s been told of by the adult, although it’s probably just fed up with the bank holiday weather like the rest of us!

This weekend though, I started seeing two of them together (although this photo only shows one and a half fledglings!)

Despite seeing the parents feed them several times, it took ages to catch them doing it somewhere where I could get a relatively clear shot with the camera. Of course when I did, the photos came out blurred – the excitement must have got to me! But you can at least see the parent is feeding a suet pellet to the eager juvenile.

They seemed to use this corner of the garden regularly to feed the young – perhaps the thorny Berberis twigs offer some protection from the neighbours cat? So I tried setting up the trail cam to capture the action – 163 videos of twigs blowing in the wind later and I got a few brief snippets of the young. They were indeed still using this area to feed them, but always it seemed just out of camera shot.

So I may not have got the perfect photo or perfect video, but the main thing is that we seem to have 2 healthy (and very greedy) fledgling robins in the garden. Fingers crossed we get the same success with the blue tits.