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| Parent blue bird watches from a nearby tree |
Round 2 of nesting is underway! Bluebirds built two new nests in the past week; one has 4 blue eggs, the other, 3. Another nest has 4 bluebird eggs in it. At least 8 young bluebirds occupy three other nestboxes.
Tree swallows built a new nest in a hanging nestbox formerly occupied by chickadees and laid 1 egg in it so far. The other tree swallow nest still has some eggs in it, but the parent bird was not incubating them and they did not swoop at me this morning. I am not sure these eggs will hatch. Usually by this point, the parent tree swallow is incubating the eggs and often refuses to budge from them when I open the box.
As I approached the box with 8 chickadees in it, I could hear loud peeping and a parent chickadee soon flew out to find more food. All is well in this box and the chickadees should fledge sometime in the next two weeks.
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| Week-old bluebirds (left) and one cowbird (right) |
A male house sparrow exited the hanging box that last week had been emptied of tree swallow eggs and plastic wrappers. Nothing had changed in the nest; it was still just a platform of grassy material, so I removed it.
