CHEHALIS POPLAR TREE FARM NEST BOXES
On February 23rd, Rachel Hudson, Ken Brown, and Kathleen Snyder went to clean and repair the 15 remaining nest boxes that Black Hills Audubon put up at the Chehalis Poplar Tree Farm, a project now in its fifth year. The good news is that only two of the boxes needed repairs. The bad news is that only two of the boxes had evidence of successful nests.
In the past, swallows made up the majority of nests found in these boxes. This year, the two successful nests were made by chickadees. There were also a few partial nests, also made by chickadees, found in some of the boxes. There were no signs of swallows at all.
We are not sure what this means. Rachel plans to do a little research in eBird on swallow sightings in this area last year. She also will come out to visually see what birds are in this area sometime in the spring/summer. We hope that this is simply a one-year aberration, not a trend of some kind.
Photo credit: Ken Brown and Kathleen Snyder, by Rachel Hudson.
