good afternoon everybody so quarter past five and it's looking absolutely beautiful um
got a bit of a question for everybody today i'm looking for a bit of advice on the darkness that
i'm doing so i've had the birds on darkness for a couple of months now and they've got
another three weeks i think on the 21st of june is when most people take them off darkness so
i'll have to double check that to make sure that's right but what i am noticing
obviously there's a lot of feathers you can see on the floor here i'm saying it's mostly these
which i think is what you would expect and they're everywhere but also i've started to notice flights
so look in the corner there we go and there's probably
i don't know a dozen of these i've found in the last week or two
and so i'm wondering if it's because well i don't really know why it is exactly could be
because when i'm boarding it up and and putting the shutters up that some light
is still getting through the cracks because it's not completely
sealed there are still bits of light coming through
but i mean if i seal it off completely there'll be no airflow either so
it is dark and is obviously working because there's feathers everywhere but i'm just
wondering if there are some birds that are sat because some people have said if they sit near
the near a light source they might lose some of the flights but i'm not sure if that's altogether
true or not so it'd be great that i can see a bunch in the corner over there let's get them
there's some see how many we can find
come on right they don't like me doing this today oh look it's loads
all right all right all right i'm done now
so these are what we've got
there's almost a wing i don't really know much about numbers on flights i know that each
feather on the wing has a number and they're meant to come out in a sequence
so these all look about the same sort of size but obviously i've got birds at different ages
um this is one of the youngest youngest ones it's because it's got its blue ring above the red ring
if they've got the telephone number below the life ring then they're one of the older birds so
you can see ryan not brian there and uh mush mush they're the two oldest but uh and i've got a few
others but there's probably two months between the oldest ones and the youngest ones and so some are
some are going through quite a heavy moult at the moment and some look like they're pretty pristine
like the white one down there ryan not brian looks pretty good until there's mush mush it's one in
the corner looks pretty good then you've got others that look a little bit less less good so
yeah so my question i guess is what's causing this and should i be worried or should i just
continue for the next two or three weeks anyway or if there's anything to be done
i mean when they're flying i'm taking photos and there's no obvious gaps in their wings but
i don't know if there would be you could hear that one squeaking like a little squeaker there
and you've got some others that are wanting to fight all the time so it's
a bit of the issue with having different birds at different ages i guess yeah so i hold these
in my hand
that's what they uh that's what they look like so
yeah i don't know which ones they are
and whether they're expected to do that or not but if anybody knows then i'd be happy to hear
hmm
so this is what i do for darkness
as you can see obviously the camera's trying its best you can't read my watch there it's
a little bit like one at the back of the loft and you can see some cracks but generally it's
pretty dark in here other than the the front and the sun's beating through when it's um
when it's cloudy it's nowhere near as light either i need something for this bit that could be a
big help and then you can see you can just about make out the birds in there but it's pretty dark
so obviously it's working to keep the birds um moulting or it's been the birds are moulting
well i'd just like to know um just like to know if those flight feathers is something
to be uh concerned about or whether it's just what it's just what happens you know look
there's a fair few of those that i've been picking up lately
so anybody has any ideas then comment and let me know