Bluebird Watch: Female prepares for Round II
Smart girl returns with her entire brood in tow, builds second nest
The more I watch, the more I think we have one smart little bluebird in our backyard this summer.
I’m talking about the female, of course. The male is just the hardworking, handsome, family assistant—not unlike myself.
Last I wrote about her crew, she had somehow managed to get her entire brood out of the house a couple of days early. It’s just a feeling, but somehow I think she was the cause of that boondoggle. She is in charge, after all.
Other than the premature launch that my wife and I swooped in to collect and return to the box for an apparently valuable 36 more hours, her first brood attempt was nearly flawless.
She started laying on March 26, had five eggs, hatched four on April 15, and pushed out the dud within 24 hours. All four grew strong and left the nest (officially on the wing) on May 1. It was practically textbook.
Like every group that left the nest before them—again with the exception of the boondoggle that had flightless juveniles scattered across our yard—the fledglings popped out of a south-facing box to reverse direction and land in tall pecan trees to the north.
It fascinates me that these little beings that have never flown and have lived inside a box with no view to the outside world but a 1 ¼-inch hole that faces to the south, somehow pop out and flutter around to the north and up 30 or 40 feet into the pecan trees on their first-ever flight.
How do they know?
This group, in the space of less than an hour, not only hit the tree behind the house but moved to the upper branches of a taller pecan about 40 yards east of our backyard. For days I heard them singing over there. Several times I watched with binoculars as the male and female made their grocery runs to and from that big tree but I never could spot the youngsters. They were way, way up there.
As storm after storm rolled through with high winds, she must have had them tucked away among sturdy branches.
Last weekend she and the male turned up in the yard again, acting all twitterpated. With the cold, rainy weather I decided to stock up the bird feeders with freeze-dried worms for protein and eggshells for calcium, and then the whole family came in for breakfast.
She hatched four chicks in April and was accompanied back to the nest with four young three weeks after they fledged. Her group already defied the odds.
As the male and the youngsters disappeared into the trees again, she stayed behind to build her second nest. It was rainy, misty, and cold, and she made the nest almost entirely out of long pine needles from my neighbor’s yard. She found a good source of relatively dry materials.
She completed the nest Tuesday but didn’t lay her first egg until after the weather cleared and warmed up on Friday. Smart girl.
She’s built the most robust nest I’ve seen in that box in 10 years. It’s so full of pine needles I have just enough room to slide my iPhone over the top and take a photo to see what’s inside. Usually, I can get on my tip-toes and look over the top.
Second nests in the past several years have had more infertile eggs, predators hit, or the kiddos burn up with high heat. But I have high hopes for this one. We have better shade in our yard than in years past and the box is painted a lighter color.
We have a predator guard on the post and, because some house sparrows are coming around lately, I’ll put a sparrow-spooker over the top, too.
The rest will be up to her, but she’s done very well so far. Fingers crossed for Round Two.
Good one!