Wildlife blog by Ron Allen – 10 September 2024
Nest box stories
Our nest boxes provide endless delight and often throw up surprises. We have some wooden, some German Schwegler ‘woodcrete’ boxes and, some home-made.
We put up a Schwegler three-hole ‘woodcrete’ nest box on our south facing wall within a grape vine (thank you Lionel) in 2011 and in year one it was used by nuthatch and which reared three young (images 1 and 2). It has also been used from time to time by blue tit and great tit, but never again by nuthatch. One time we watched a bluetit expel a dead nestling (with some difficulty) through one of the three entrance holes.
We were given a nest box fitted with a camera and ran the cable through the living room window to the television. It was soon used by house sparrows, but they brought in so much nest material burying the birds so deeply as to be almost completely hidden from the camera (image 3). A few years ago, when almost dark, I spotted several wrens entering the box, and which must have been using the box as a communal roost. We did put up a globular wren nest box, which failed for wrens, but bluetits used it one year (image 4).
We have long had a Schwegler single-hole nest box by our kitchen window and most years has been used by bluetits (image 5) and sometimes by house sparrows (image 6). One year it was taken over by wasps which partially sealed the entrance, and this year the box remained unused.
1 Three nuthatch nestlings almost ready to leave the nest.
2 Feeding a nuthatch nestling.
3 Sparrow nestling in camera nest box.
4 Blue at wren nest box.
5 Blue tit at kitchen nest box
6 Sparrow and nestling at kitchen nest box.
A long time ago I put up a wooden single hole nest box on my mother’s shed in Essex and it was a complete failure. After mum died, I recovered the box and brought it home, put it on our shed and again it failed to be used for many years until one day, we were sitting in the garden and a wren flew by and took a feather into the box. Feathering the nest continued for several days and we hope a brood of young wrens was successfully hatched (image 7).
Another of our boxes was a three-section wooden house sparrow terrace box which we put high up under the eaves and which has been regularly used by sparrows (image 8). Last year we found squirrels in our loft (image 9) and however many we trapped they always seem to return (turned out we had a family of squirrels). One day we saw a squirrel climbing up our brick wall sometimes aided by a drainpipe (image 10) and, while sitting on the sparrow box, was calmly chewing a hole through the soffit to gain roof entry. Sadly, we have now taken the box down.
We hung a bat box high on our wall in the hope that bats might use it. This box has two entrances both at the base, one to the front and one to the back. Sadly no bats, but one year it was fascinatingly used by hornets. Another year we saw bluetits going into the box and assumed they had reared young (image 11). On opening the box later, we found several dead young blue tits, the two entrances had been completely covered by dense nest material and so they could not escape.
A further wooden box was used by bluetits in the first year but the next year it was opened by great spotted woodpeckers. I had hoped the open box might be used by robins or balckbirds, but not yet.
Ron Allen 10 September 2024
7 Wren brings feathers to the nest box.
8 Sparrow feeding nestlings at terrace box.
9 One of the family of squirrels using our loft.
10 Squirrel climbing our wall to get to the sparrow box.
