It's a bit early, but of the four nests built, two have hatched the chicks or part of. It's not even too late to build a nest and lay eggs. I am expecting Box 14 on the South side to do that. It has had a bluebird nest at least three years.
In one box, the three nestlings have hatched within a day, and two eggs are still to hatch. A little risky, as a week of cold weather may spell disaster for bluebirds.
On the North side, a shiny new box has five eggs. I may have to put a wren guard on that box.
Next door to it, with an empty box, a house wren was busy inspecting it. It will fill it up with small sticks in a few weeks. I don't really want it invading the bluebirds next door.
Nesting continues on the South side. I will check the North side boxes a bit more carefully next time, but we only get a couple of Bluebirds interested there.
On the South side there are two boxes with 5 eggs and one box with two. This pair nested in the box closer to the road of Box 3 and Box 4. That box has been a successful location several years in a row. The back box always has swallows, Box 4.
I'm not used to keeping track of mouse nests, but I believe a deer mouse carried several of her babies up the pole back to a box. Her young are rather grown now. Time to leave! The other two mice left their nest box. All mouse nests have been on the model shown in the front in the above photo. Mice do not nest in boxes that have the slot at the top.
I dealt with the three mouse nests, discovered a month ago. It takes about a month for the naked babies to grow and be old enough to survive and move on the ground. See the adult mouse and smaller pup in the previous post.
Two nests are perfectly normal, one with one egg, one with four.
All the eggs are near white in all the boxes, but swallows do not have eggs yet (several nests built) and are clearly smaller as well.
The third nest was the odd one. One egg in the nest but two broken eggs on the ground. Swallows may fight for a box but do now break eggs. This is the work o house wrens, which have nested in these boxes at this stretch of the South side last year. They nest more past July than now. But are very possessive of hole nests in their territory.
The North side had the usual swallow nests but only one likely Bluebird nest with no eggs.
I checked the boxes that had the mouse nests, and the problem is, all had mouse pups in them. So those will not be available for bluebirds. Checking again mid May.
The two brand new boxes had nothing, but at a nearby box, there was one fully built nest with no eggs. There have been eggs in April in a few years, and some of those even hatched and survived, but on the whole, April eggs are a risk of failure here.
Swalllow have settled on who gets what box and have put some grass and feathers in a few boxes. Swallow eggs do not come till mid May.
There is not much happening with bluebirds yet. I will check the boxes for nesting materials next week. Meanwhile...in a pond on the North side, not Pioneers park, a different marsh:
We had a bit of snow so I went to see if there was any fallout of migrating birds. In a storm they just land at the nearest pond. Not a huge number of species but some 30 godwits and 15 lesser yellowlegs.
For these photos, click the photo for a larger version:
I went out there with a shovel again, and as I had 14 boxes to check as well, took the bike, the shovel is on it:
that is a small loop that has no bike traffic. I moved the two boxes back there, as they had been in wet ground for years and tended to tip over. One box is in slight upland near the creek now, with the other one almost by the creek:
I cleaned out all 14 boxes, but there was a slight problem in that three boxes were occupied by field mice. How do I know? I had seen that once or twice before and the mice had left by end of May. This however had a mouse, because the mom jumped out as soon as I opened the box. She will climb back for her babies. They can even move the babies one by one, if she thinks I am a threat. The fluffy cotton will come up all the way to the hole.
I found two house wren nests left from last August. They make a tiny nest on top of the sticks the male puts in:
There were 5 or 6 bluebirds acting aggressive to each other as they sort out the nesting issues, territories. Also some tree swallows were beginning to look at boxes. They claim them but do nothing till one day in May, a nest is all built, feather lined and eggs appear almost immediately.
I was not really equipped to take photographs, and the little bit of video I got does not show the birds. But as soon as I replaced two boxes on the South side in the middle, a pair of bluebirds appared to check them out.
The old one is on top, I took it away to keep as a spare, we have boxes that are worse than that. I also have new poles so I may move some locations around. Two in particular are in wet marsh.
The two new ones are shown here, with the female preferring the back one. I will check them in a week or two. I can then report "nesting" in eBird, if there is grass inside.
