By Jerry and Joan Asling
As you know we try to monitor our boxes at least four times during the nesting season. As we are now leaving our boxes open over the winter, due to mice thinking our boxes were mice heaven – warm, cosy and safe from predators – our first go-round is to close all the doors of our boxes. And the last trip is when we open them in the fall. The past few years we have welcomed Clarke Birchard’s offer to help us do the opening and closing in the Scone/Kinghurst area.
Another problem we have been dealing with is the removal of road fences from fields that once were pasture. This has had a huge impact on our nest box numbers and our wallets. Usually the farmer pulls out all the posts and then lights a big bonfire. So, not only do we lose the habitat, we also lose our boxes.
We continue to buy our 1 inch cedar lumber from an Amish sawmill, but the one we used east of Scone is no longer there as the family moved to New Brunswick. There is another sawmill a couple of concessions farther north, so will be going there from now on.
Here then are our nesting counts for 2014
Bluebirds Nesting’s 39 Fledged 139
Tree Swallows Nesting’s 154 Fledged 884
House Wrens Nesting’s 5 Fledged 24
Chickadees Nesting’s 0 Fledged 0
The results for 2013 were about the same for bluebirds. The 2013 count for fledged Tree Swallows was 120 less than 2014. 2012 was the high year for fledged bluebirds at 254.
Kinghurst Forest Bioblitz
May 9, 2015
