Bluebirds, Finally! | Week 8

Hello birders!

I have some more exciting news about our nests this week. Before I get into any of that, though, let’s do a weekly recap of how our nests are doing! Out of 34 nests, 23 nests are occupied, 11 nests have eggs, and 5 nests have hatchlings. Below, I will insert a screenshot of the data I collected this week.

Hatchlings
The main thing I would like to talk about is our hatchlings! This week we have a nest of every kind: some with hatchlings, some with eggs and hatchlings, some with only eggs, and some with nothing at all! I am going to focus on the nest we had hatchlings in last week, our first chickadee nest! Now these hatchlings are all grown up (time flies, right?) and about to fledge. This means next week, we cannot monitor this box. This is to prevent artificial fledging, which I mentioned in one of the previous blogs, and to not disturb the birds in the fledging process. Everything we do to help these birds is to help get them to this stage, so we want to do everything in our power to make sure they fledge. Here’s a photo of the older hatchlings I just mentioned as well as some younger chickadee hatchlings.

Surprise, surprise!
I have a little funny story for you guys today about the bluebirds. My mom and I were doing our rounds of the meadow boxes to finish our monitoring session today. We stopped right before nest box 20 to take my BeReal and were talking about how it was a bummer that we didn’t have a bluebird box to show you guys. As I opened box 20, I saw a straw nest, which is very characteristic of a bluebird nest. There weren’t any blue eggs in it, so we didn’t know for sure, but I told my mom I swore that this was a bluebird. Right as I said that, two western bluebirds flew down to the tree right next to the box. As we were walking away, we saw them both enter the nest. Hopefully they lay eggs sometime this week and I can show you guys the blue eggs. They’re so cute!

See you guys next week!