PERSONAL | But baby I'm alive

You'll probably be thinking 'What the hell is that?'. A while ago, my mum bought a nesting box with a camera inside it (not assembled - that was my job) so that we could watch the blue tits nesting in the garden. What we thought were three chicks were doing great until Sunday, when the mother and father didn't seem to be feeding as much, and then they and all the chicks disappeared altogether. Yesterday, I took the box down, and checked inside it, to find the nest in ruins and at the bottom, three unhatched eggs, and five dead chicks. And then, two moved. I used the nest to make new nest in one of my bowls, warmed up the live chicks, and started feeding them with tweezers. They seemed to have lost their instinct to open their beaks, so I was left wedging tiny bits of raw mince into their beaks with a pin head, and massaging their throats to encourage them to eat. The littlest one didn't last long, but the other was fed every fifteen minutes for three hours, checked at one this morning, and then woken up at 6:45 this morning and has been feeding every fifteen minutes since. He's remembered how to open his beak, and has also learned how to cheep. Unfortunately whatever attacked the nest seems to have damaged his eye and cut his beak a little, but he's making up for it with mince. He looks more like a baby velociraptor or a naked mole rat than a baby blue tit, but he's kind of cute in a really, really ugly way.

Right, it's food time again.