Spring Inspiration

I was looking forward to Spring this year even more than normal as I felt like I lost the beginning of the year as I was recovering from surgery. I was very lucky really that I was recuperating at a time when it was still chilly and I didn’t feel like I was missing out being stuck indoors. To be honest I used a lot of the time to draw and finish pieces that had been hanging about unfinished. So after my cosy hibernation I loved to see new life popping up outside.

The activity in our garden inspires a lot of the work I create. We are slowly turning our urban garden into a wildlife garden and trying to provide many opportunities for the local wildlife to share our space and thrive. Last year it was the solitary bee box that fascinated me but this year the blue tits had me obsessed…literally😉 We have three blue tit nest boxes Adam made and two of them were used successfully to house two families. One of the boxes is quite near the house so we were surprised it was used(this year and last) but luckily for us they did and we had a great vantage point from the kitchen window.

I absolutely loved watching them from the first gathering of nest materials and then trying to work out when the chicks had hatched and feeling so sorry for the bedraggled parents as they looked more and more tired as they spent all their days bringing caterpillars back to the chicks. Adam has had training to check the nest boxes using an endoscope safely so we found out both boxes homed around five or six fledglings each. We didn’t get to see any of the fledglings leave the nests but we could work out by the parents behaviour when it probably was. Blue tits are such swift movers but Adam managed to capture them in the above pictures. I also took a quick snap of a nest from one of the boxes(the blue tits were long gone at this point) Seeing the nest up close really was awe inspiring. I was taken aback by how big it was how much dedication it took to build.

It felt so special to see the magic of nature so up close for a couple of months and I couldn’t resist painting some blue tits. I decided to use them on my new business cards first but have other plans for the design too - greeting cards being top of the list.
Fingers crossed we are hoping to get a nest camera next year so we can see what is actually going on in the nest boxes✌️and I imagine more blue tit inspired work will follow!