Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve spent about half of our time indoors in the Innovation Lab, building a set of nest boxes for cavity-nesting birds. We’re making three houses, using a slightly modified design from Nestwatch at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, that we’ll mount on telescoping poles complete with predator baffles. The kids are basically doing all of the work; my job is to see that no one loses a finger.
Many birds are cavity nesters in dead trees and snags—find an old dead tree in the woods and you’ll see that it’s a veritable bird condo, riddled with nest holes—but these can be hard to come by in residential neighborhoods. Homeowners are understandably reluctant to leave dead trees standing for aesthetic or, especially, safety reasons. I have personal experience in this matter, having left a dead tree in the back yard of my former house because Northern Flickers were successfully nesting there—only to have it take out a wooden fence when it inevitably fell. So boxes provide valuable nesting sites, with the added benefit that we can peek inside and keep tabs on the action.
Different species of bird prefer differently sized boxes with different diameters of nest holes, and with our range of boxes we could attract Brown-headed Nuthatch, Carolina Chickadee, Tufted Titmouse, White-breasted nuthatch, and Prothonotary Warbler (we’ll site one specifically to try to reel in one of these flying jewels).
We think maybe two more class days will complete the work, and then we can get out and put them up. In the weeks ahead, we’ll monitor them regularly and submit data to Nestwatch. Please, please, please, campus birds, make my kids happy and move in!
We’ve been alternating lab days with outdoor days, going birding, making tree-species comparison sketches, and, most recently, establishing the first of a series of solo sit-spots that the kids will revisit at regular intervals to record the onset of spring in a specific location.
And finally, I’m learning a good bit about how and how not to place a wildlife trail cam. Twice now I’ve gone down to Otter Pond to check the footage and make adjustments. We’ve got lots of deer activity on film, and we’ll spend our next rainy non-lab class day recording this activity in our journals to see what questions we can raise and what conclusions we can draw about them.
No otters yet. But we’ve got several mystery nighttime visitors that came up and rubbed on (or possibly peed on) the camera. All of them too close to get anything other than lots of fur. Hopefully my latest camera position will give us clearer results.
postcards from the outback 