In this blog we wanted to share with you some great news about many of the Spring Eastern Bluebird babies in Marietta, Georgia. A couple of years ago, Lisa and I were lucky enough to find a local park which was seeking volunteers that would "lease" an Eastern Bluebird nest box for 2 years for a small fee. This fee included 2 years of mealworms for the area feeders on the property. This property is known as "Kemp Park" which is a 94-acre property with gorgeous rolling hills, meadows and forest and even includes a couple of streams and a small pond. Kemp Park is located off Burnt Hickory Road. If you'd like to read more about Kemp Park specifically, and get involved or make a donation to this beautiful property for a few improvements, here is the "Friends of Kemp Park" link.
Initially, we paid the fee and then went to walk at the park sometimes and look at the nest boxes. After the 2 years passed, the volunteer group "Friends of Kemp" reached out and asked if we'd like to renew. OF COURSE we w did... then we were also invited to participate in the Spring and Summer bird house nest-checking process that they have implemented. It's a pretty cool gig! This is how it works:
A number of volunteers get together in Early Spring, and are given a fairly simple schedule to follow. The people that are enlisted will need to come to the park when it's their scheduled turn. During their visit, they (in a few cases "we") will check each nest box for eggs, fresh-hatched young and also record their findings for the group on a clipboard. One of the tools used will include a small mirror, which can be used to look downward into the nest after opening the front or side of each bluebird box.
During our preliminary tour of Kemp Park with the group lead and several of the other volunteers, I also brought along a pretty cool tool which is usually found in many auto-mechanic toolboxes. This tool is called a "boroscope", which is a tiny flexible camera with a 25' coiled cable which can be fed into small, tight spaces so they can be inspected. I've even used ours to find a small pinhole leak in a copper pipe which was deep in our laundry room wall. The idea for this tool being used for bird house checking was simple: most bird nests are built neatly into the birdhouses, several inches thick, and the nest materials often conform to the shape of the box which is fine if you only open a door temporarily. However, I prefer NOT disturbing the nest material or the eggs, hatchlings, and even the nesting parents, if at all possible. So, the boroscope is perfect. It has two different cameras; one that is on the end and looks straight ahead, and has a dimmable LED light around it. The second camera lens is located on the side, and depending on which way you point it, can see easily up, down etc.
During our first volunteer Nest Box check at Kemp Park, we found Eastern Bluebird eggs or hatchlings in 7 of the 9 nest boxes. Using the provided "volunteer tool kit" we checked for wasp nests in any early stages of being built, checked for ants that may be infiltrating the nests, we counted the eggs and young hatchlings and made notes of anything that needed attention on the property. It was exciting, and we loved to see the young (and the eggs!). I was also extremely pleased that we didn't encounter any eggs from Brown-headed Cowbirds, European Starlings or House Sparrows.
In addition to the nest boxes at Kemp Park, we returned home and used the Depstech Boroscope on our own birdhouses. We found that our 4 Eastern Bluebird eggs had hatched as well! Here are some photos of the eggs when we first checked the box a couple of weeks earlier, and an image of the hatchlings nestled into each other's wings and shoulders. They were ADORABLE!
3 short weeks later, the fledglings left the nest box and would not return (they don't go back to the nest once they are able to fly, instead they will fly around with their parents and beg for food for 2-3 more weeks until they will follow them to the deck railings (and our dried mealworm stash) or the "house feeder" which we also stock with mealworms. Once they have fledged, we clean out the birdhouse nest material using a mild vinegar solution or some simple green, and scrape off any chunks of infant-rearing that may be adhering to the sides of the birdbox. It was funny, when I removed this nest material, it seemed like there was a slight layer of new pine straw on top of the original nest. Maybe it was my imagination.
The very next morning while we were filling the bird feeders and bird baths for the day, I saw a female Eastern Bluebird land on the box and go inside. Are you kidding? Not in the slightest. The bluebirds wasted NO time whatsoever rebuilding a completely new nest. In 48 hours we poked our little boroscope camera back in the hole, and found Bella was sitting in the nest already! She didn't even get up/fly out of the box so we left her alone. The following evening, we checked it again and there was already an egg!
Did you know that Eastern Bluebirds will only lay one egg each day. Usually a clutch (a clutch is the total number of eggs that a female will lay at one time), is 4-5 eggs, but sometimes there are 6 or even 8 at a time! Another interesting thing we learned, was that sometimes the juveniles from the last brood will sometimes help feed the young hatchlings in a nest! We had no idea this occurred. They take care of their families!
Here is some more interesting information for you Eastern Bluebird fans (if you are on Facebook, we found a couple of fantastic pages which talk a lot about Eastern Bluebirds and have very active groups that provide feedback, tips, tricks, and more details to help you with your feathered friends!
Here are the product links from this blog also, in case this helps you avoid scrolling back through the whole blog post to find the links we mentioned:
As always, thanks for reading and checking out this blog featuring our Spring Baby Bluebirds from Marietta, Georgia! -Lisa and Dan from https://birdsofwestcobb.com