Dear Swifty Supporter
It has been almost two months since the swallows and other birds started checking out the 197 boxes that we are monitoring. We want to share our success at this stage.
We use endoscopes to monitor and photograph activity inside the boxes – this minimizes the disturbance to the birds. There have been at least 111 nesting attempts, over 200 eggs counted, 25 young, and 6 fledges. The majority of these are tree and violet-green swallows, though some are chickadees, wood ducks and mergansers.
Some Observations:
We have five new areas (close to a third of our boxes) where we have expanded our SWIFTY footprint. It takes a while for the swallows to find these boxes, so they lag behind in nesting attempts.
Purple Martins (PUMAs) arrive much later than the swallows and are now just starting to initiate nesting activity. We are optimistic that two of our three sites (Hatfield Estuary Trail and the Alsea Marina) will have nesting pairs. The third set of PUMA boxes, installed at Beaver Creek State Park, got taken over by tree swallows.
Two of the three wood duck boxes that we placed in the Beaver Creek Valley have active nests and once we check the third, the most remote one, we hope to confirm the same. Three for three would be a SWIFTY success story. We also had a successful Hooded Merganser nest on the south fork of the Yachats River where six chicks fledged.
The photos show a female PUMA sitting in the doorway of a nest tube; a Tree Swallow mom with eggs; and some newly-hatched and hungry chickadee nestlings.
Jim, Wally, Bob, Marty and Robert
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