Area One - final tally for 2018

Finally, I got up to Area One, met my friend Jimmy, and we inspected those couple boxes to finish off the year. All were empty so it's safe to say that the late nest with 3 eggs in box #8 and the 4 eggs in the re-nest of #11 all hatched, and the birds fledged.

Upon cleaning out #11, there was nothing beneath this nest to say what happened to the previous nest. If you may recall, there was 6 eggs and when I returned weeks later, only one large juvenile Tree Swallow. My next visit, hoping to clean the nest out, and see with my own eyes if the eggs did not hatch or the 5 young perished, I found a re-nest with 4 new eggs. To be fair, I only counted that 1 hatched bird from the initial 6 eggs in the end. No sense in upping my counts for anything, it's not a competition.

It was a very warm walk through Area One today, in some jungle like foliage.

We did clean out a few other boxes where Wrens set up or created dummy nests, some after the Swallows left. A bizarre thing I've not seen since starting to monitor nest boxes, meaning so many sudden Wren nests. I know we had 3 active pairs for sure but found traces to say six boxes had something going on (maybe more when I do a sweep later in the fall).

So, final tally is 71 fledged Tree Swallows through 14 nests. We suffered more loss this year with eggs than ever before, but we also had a great year for fledges. I hate that this blog is coming out so late now, so many weeks after the birds left; but between the ridiculous heat and humidity, plus the wild parsnip growing in some spots, I/we just let things be for a while. I had collected enough data and wasn't worrying too hard about the last couple nests since I had egg counts at the very least.

Lastly, I bought myself a post driver tool.

It will be $60 well spent even if I only drive in the 7 t-bars I have here at home, and set up 7 new boxes in a couple areas. I'm debating on the Forgotten Land for one just because of that "organization". I know I want to put another one or two up in the Lambton site. I also have another area in mind I would like to experiment with. Sure I have 7 t-bars, but do I have 7 nest boxes to go with them, seeing as I need to replace a couple now in the Forgotten Land? No, but there's time to work on that.

Enough rambling. I will be back again in due time.

Thanks for following me in the 2018 season.