National Nestbox Week - to do or not to do ...

[Stew]

I wonder if a nice cheap option for a ball would be drilling a coconut?

 

[Toddy]

Coconut goes mouldy, rancid and stinks if it's not scraped out and dried.

 

[Stew]

I would assume to clean the flesh out first!

 

[Toddy]

Depends on the size of the hole you need to drill to suit the bird. It's blooming hard to scrape out a coconut anyway by hand, but trying to do it through a 1 and an 1/8th of an inch hole, would be an entire other em.....well, you get my meaning :blush:

Wren House, Dimensions, Hole Size, Material Types

Information on the Wren House and how it should be built, placement, hole size, and more.

www.wild-bird-watching.com

Any bigger than that and the bluetits and sparrows will try to take over, apparently.

 

[Stew]

Challenge accepted. I have some nice swan necked gouges that will help.

 

[Broch]

OK, I'll come clean

I do feed, as wide a variety of food as I can, from end November to end March.

The land I have has a wide variety of natural nest sites as well as bird boxes that I have put up closer to the house.

Last year, between the natural sites and the boxes, we had nesting:

Blue tit
Great tit
Long-tailed tit (they make their own beautiful spherical nests in the scrub)
Spotted flycatcher
Pied flycatcher
Redstart
Robin
Wren
Blackbird
Song thrush
Wood pigeon
Magpie
Carrion crow
Raven
Great spotted woodpecker
Pied wagtail
Dunnock
Blackcap
Chiffchaff (and other warbler species)
Goldcrest
Nuthatch
Woodcock

And, probably, a load of others in the dense scrub and woodland

 

[Broch]

Challenge accepted. I have some nice swan necked gouges that will help.

It's perfectly feasible to split one in two, gouge it out, then glue it back together

 

[JonathanD]

To be fair. I feed too. I bred and released 400 bright blue budgies last year. Well, you gotta love the sparrowhawk.

 

[Toddy]

@Broch
Nice
Lovely to have such a variety

I don't have nestboxes; I do have hedges and fences covered in ivy, etc., and lots of trees around.

Within 50m of the house, we have nesting....hoodie crows, magpies, woodpeckers, blackbirds, thrushes, coal tits, blue tits, long tailed tits, great tits, siskins, robins, wrens, house sparrows, dunnocks, reed buntings, bullfinches, starlings, woodpigeons, pigeons, ducks, (we live next to a burn) and nearby enough to either fly overhead daily (buzzards) or come to the feeders at times, we have moorhens, rooks, redwings, swallows and martins, and assorted owls. We also have flittermice (bats), lots and lots of bats.
Suburbia doesn't need to be a wildlife wasteland

 

[Broch]

That's a good list

I often think you see a lot more in suburban environments than out in the country. The wildlife is more concentrated and visible whereas in the country it's dispersed and less likely to rely on human support. I have a large area of scrub (mainly thorn and bramble) that could be a veritable city of wildlife nesting, but I've no way of observing it.

We are just beginning to see Red Kites over the barn - not every day and some weeks we go without seeing them. They are around but, for some reason, not over our hills.

We submit a weekly bird list and an annual moth list to the county recorders and submit our own identification of other flora and fauna via the BIS for Powys.

It keeps us busy

 

[Toddy]

We get a lot of moths, probably why there are so many bats. I have to admit I'm not fond of moths, and the ones the size of butterflies are...yeah :yikes: The ghost moths, the big horned things, even had a hummingbird hawkmoth in the garden, and that's as big as a bird.

M