Robin redbreast

For a week or more, a robin has been using one of the arms of our rotary clothes line as a staging post.  At one time there were two of them side by side.  He (or maybe it's a she) perches there, sometimes for several minutes, with a beak full of something.  If he (or she) thinks there is something or somebody fairly close by, he flies off a short distance to perch in the tamerisk before coming back again to the clothes line.  When finally satisfied that the coast is clear, he (or she) darts off to a spot behind the daphne, only to emerge fairly quickly with an empty beak.  I have come to the conclusion that there is a nest with what is probably a second brood of chicks.  It doesn't seem a very sensible spot in which to build a nest, being only two or three feet above the ground and easily within reach of one of the many cats in our neighbourhood.  Or the foxes, with which we are plagued - although maybe a robin chick is too small for a fox to bother with.

I had been planning to get into that spot to prunes the branches of our next-door neighbour's leylandii trees and to cut back the ivy (also from our neighbour's garden) which cascades over the fence and has grown a bit too thick.  Obviously, I will now have to wait until the robin's have finished their business.  The perfect excuse for doing nothing.

And here is one of the parents.  Not the greatest example of wildlife photography but I'm not unhappy with it.  (For our cousins across the pond, this is a European robin, erithacus rubecula, 5" in length, little more than half the size of the American robin.)