You’re in for a tweet, with National Nest Box Week

Hazel Evans (Nest Records secretary) writes:

With flurries of snow and frosty mornings over the weekend just gone it hardly feels as though spring is in the air, however some of our garden birds such as Blackbirds and Collared Doves have already started nesting and now is the time for nest box residents to start looking for a place to raise their young. This week is the BTO and Jacobi Jayne’s National Nest Box Week, which aims to encourage and promote putting up nest boxes in your garden and local area.

Whether you buy a nest box from your local garden centre or build a selection of your own, there is no doubt that putting up a nest box is one of the most valuable things you can do for your garden birds. The BTO’s National Nest Box Week webpage contains lots of information on which nest boxes are suitable, how to build a box and where to place them. You may be surprised by the variety of boxes that are available, from Barn Owl to House Martin and Blue Tit to Starling.

Nuthatch. Photo by Edmund Fellows

If you are looking to do more than putting up a couple of boxes in your own garden, you might consider contacting a local landowner, farmer, the council at a local park, or if your children are enthusiastic, their school might allow a few nest boxes to be put up in the grounds. Once the boxes are securely in place it is time to wait and keep your fingers crossed!

Hopefully you will soon see some activity at the box; birds entering and leaving, pecking the entrance hole and carrying nesting material in. The real conservation value of erecting a box is the opportunity it provides to monitor nesting attempts. As long as the BTO Nest Record Scheme (NRS) Code of Conduct is adhered to, we can safely look inside at intervals to count the number of eggs and chicks and submit this data to the scheme. This provides incredibly valuable data, and is also a rewarding and fascinating thing to do. This information is used by the BTO to study the breeding performance of wild birds to help identify when reduced productivity might be causing population declines. People can be concerned about opening up a nest box and checking the contents, but done in the correct way the value of the data collected is huge.

Each year, data from NRS are analysed and, alongside results from the Constant Effort Sites (CES) ringing scheme, are used to produce a summary of the breeding season. In 2016, the data collected by NRS and CES volunteers showed that whilst there were good numbers of adults at the start of the season, there was a late start to the breeding season for some species and productivity was generally poor. Additional results from NRS are presented in the annual BirdTrends report.

As this is the Demog Blog, I feel that as well as the nest monitoring side of nest boxes, I should also mention the value of ringing these broods. I am currently a trainee ringer and in addition to monitoring the nests in the boxes at BTO HQ and a local farm, I am able to ring all of the chicks (under the supervision of my trainer). This provides a huge amount of data – this year I will be monitoring around 70 nest boxes – and it is also a fantastic learning experience.

A Blue Tit shaking it's Bluti. Photo by Jill Pakenham

The most common inhabitants of our nest boxes are Blue and Great Tits. Combining the data from the thousands of nests monitored every year with the thousands of pulli ringed, provides an invaluable national picture for these species. The amazing coverage provided by BTO volunteers allows BTO scientists to explore how changes in the environment affect breeding birds and how their responses vary between regions and habitats. 

Nest boxes can of course be put up at any time of year but winter is ideal as it provides time for prospecting birds to find the site before the breeding season. Once used, it is a great idea to clean out old nests the following winter to allow for a fresh start in the spring. To comply with legislation, nests can only be cleaned out between 1 September and 31 January.

This year we are celebrating 20 years of National Nest Box week, so please do get involved by putting up a nest box and make your contribution really worthwhile by registering with the Nest Record Scheme. 

Leicestershire produces record Nuthatches

Ian Gamble writes:

"Birds have been ringed in my parent’s garden in Quorn, Leicestershire, for some 60 years and this has provided us with a wealth of information on our local birds. The garden, which is 80 feet long and 40 feet wide, borders onto a mixed woodland called Kay’s Plantation. In 1991 I married and left Quorn for Hertfordshire and now only return to Quorn to visit family, usually over New Year on my father's birthday (20th March). During these periods I get a few hours ringing in while they are still sleeping.

Ian's parents' garden in Quorn

Nuthatch is a localised resident in Quorn and regularly feeds in the garden and had nested on and off for nearly 50 years in a nest box that my father had put up at the bottom of the garden until it fell off few years ago. You would always know when the birds were starting to use the box because they would plaster mud around the entrance hole. These birds are sedentary and we catch the same individuals with some regularity over two or three years. The largest number caught in any one year was five in 1967, and we have ringed four birds in a year on four occasions, with 74 individuals ringed in the garden over the years.

Prior to this latest capture, the oldest individual retrapped was 4 years 6 months old. Over the last few years my father had kept saying to me he thought the male Nuthatch was quite old, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't catch it. Sunday 22nd March 2015 (whilst visiting my father on his 88th birthday) was a fine still morning and I decided to get in a few hours ringing in before church. One of the birds caught was a Nuthatch; an adult male with ring number TE27966. I immediately realised it was old, but not quite sure just how old!

Nuthatch in the garden (not the record-breaker, who was camera-shy)

On my return home to Hertfordshire I checked it out on IPMR and found that I had ringed it on 31st December 2005, making it well over nine years old! I had previously retrapped this bird on 24th March 2007, 21st March 2009 and 1st January 2010. As highlighted above, this is one case where understanding the movements of the ringer is more important than the movements of the bird..."

The previous longevity record for Nuthatch was a bird ringed in the nest May 1964 (also in Leicestershire!) and killed by a cat  in February 1973, making it 8 years 8 months old.