Regular visitors to Planet Gary, and quite a few of the local residents, might recall I made mention of three bird boxes I constructed from scrap wood back on Blog 10-01-23. Now, with the bird breeding season getting underway, I’ve finally got all three boxes mounted out in the wilds, one down in Selkirk in my mum’s back garden and the other two in my own garden. To recap. We were getting a porch built and I asked the builder’s to lay aside the timber from the eaves. Unfortunately, this wasn’t possible but they did give me some off cuts of 190 x 15 mm dressed mahogany, from which I was able to construct three nest boxes from. Dead chuffed with that!
Nothing to report on the Selkirk nest box as yet but good news about the blue tit box in the back garden. The box has been up about a week now and blue tits were in the box the very next day after mounting on the side of Cathryn’s shed. It didn’t take them long to claim that one! They are inside it most days. At first, they started off seemingly inspecting the box. Then they started pecking around the entrance hole – I could hear them from inside my own shed. Not quite sure that this behaviour means but the RSPB site suggests it’s all part of nesting behaviour, laying claim to the site. Today they were chasing away the sparrows. Not that the sparrows can get inside anyway, the hole is too small for them. Looks like the tits have made a firm claim to the box. I’ll be following up with any further events as they occur. Really cool seeing a nice pair of tits in the back garden. You don’t see a nice pair of tits often enough. Now keeping an eye out for them bringing nesting material into the box.
As for the third nest box, I’ve re-jigged that one to be more suitable for wrens, creating a slightly larger hole on the side. No point having too many blue tit/coal tit boxes too close together. We also have a three-compartment sparrow box along the side of the house. Two compartments are for sparrows and one for blue or coal tits. This box has been up about 10 years and has been used every year, either sparrows, blue tits, coal tits or great tits. One year we had sparrows and great tits at the same time, on another sparrows and blue tits. The revised wren box has been located low down in some thick shrubbery. I watched two wrens this morning flitting about there, so fingers crossed, this one will also get used. Back soon.
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