University Place

cc >> I have a bluebird trail at Lake Farms County Park which is just south of the South Towne area off the Beltline. One day after work I was riding my motorcycle and I had decided to check on a box that I had bluebirds trying to nest in. But they were getting a lot of competition from tree swallows. I stopped and I saw this bluebird fighting diligently to try and maintain his nest box. All I had was a two megapixal pocket digital camera and a small pair of binoculars that I carry on my motorcycle. I held the binoculars up to the truck of the tree and I used the camera as a telephoto lens zoomed-in. That's the photo I got.

exclamations

You can see he's a little bit mad. Not at me, he's mad at the tree swallow that he was fighting with. But that was probably back in about 2006 or 2005, somewhere in there. As I was introduced, I said the Madison Audubon Society. I've been very active in the Madison Audubon Society. We do have a lot of bluebird trails in Dane County and Columbia County. But I'm also with the Bluebird Restoration Association of Wisconsin which is a state-wide organization that tries to monitor the numbers of bluebirds that are fledged each year. They formed about 26 years ago. Bluebirds had just about disappeared from the state of Wisconsin. They just about disappeared from the eastern part of the country all together. A guy named Lauren -- decided that he was going to start a program to try and promote bluebird house placement, bluebird house building. He got all these states to kind of like get interested in forming state-wide affiliates. In Wisconsin the DNR was the one that got it started the first three years. There was a lot of, I would say, start-up funding for the group back then. After three years it became a non-profit group. It's been that way ever since. I'm on the board of director and I'm the editor of their newsletter, called "The Wisconsin Bluebird." The handouts that I gave you today are actually the membership form, but there's a lot of good information in this pamphlet that tells you a lot about nest houses, nest boxes, the types of poles to use and where to place the boxes. Stuff like that. You're probably going to forget most of what I'm telling you after a few minutes anyway, with all the other things going on at the Garden Expo. So that will be very helpful. Then when you do your evaluation forms just remember the word excellent is a nice word to circle once in a while.

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All right, here's a quote from Aldo Leopold. I think everybody around Wisconsin pretty much knows that he was one of the first researchers and botanists that decided to improve the environment for wildlife. Whether you're a hunter, a bird watcher or just a naturalist, it's what we do to our land and habitat that really makes it enjoyable for the creatures that live there. This is going back to 1934. At that time bluebirds were already in trouble as far as their numbers declining. We'll get into some of the reasons why that was happening a little bit later. All right, so let's take a look at the different bluebirds here. The male is on the top, a little brighter colors. The female is the one hanging on the front of the box. She's a little bit more muted, but actually a very pretty. For the female of the species she's not the dull brown that they often have to be. She's not out in a nest in a bush of something where she has to be more camouflaged. That's part of the reason. She's inside the nest box cavity so she's a little more protected. I've seen some females that have been almost as brightly colored as a male. So that when I look at them from the front I can't tell, until they turn and I can see that they've got the more bluish-gray on the head and back. This is pretty typical of what I have. This box is at Lake Kegonsa State Park. I have about five trails in southeast Dane County. I think I'm up to about 80 boxes that I have spread out in different areas, county parks in the area. I've got a city park down in Stoughton where I live. I maintain all these. If there's any problems with the houses needing to be repaired, you know, or something. I have different monitors that help me during the summer. They let me know if something's wrong, if we need to replace them or move them to a different area. I have the trails but I have people that are just really anxious to volunteer to do this kind of hobby. It's such a fun thing to do. There's an immature. You might notice that this looks very similar to a baby robin in a way. That's because bluebirds are in the thrush family the same as robins are. They're cousins. Robins would have more of a spotted breast on the front rather then the way this one has more of a streaking, and the eye ring. This one was in one of the arboretums in Stoughton. I was just down there trying to find out if there was a second nesting going on and about five of these bluebirds started hanging around in one of the orchard trees right by me. They're kind of inquisitive to me as to what I was doing down there. It was kind of fun. This is an area at Lake Kegonsa State Park. I'm not sure, when they built Lake Kegonsa State Park they must have thought that half of Madison was going to be using it every weekend. They put in a lot of asphalt parking lot areas down there. This was done in the mid to late '60s, I believe. This is an overflow parking lot for the beach area. I've only ever seen parked there is a couple of cars or trucks with boat trailers that they park because there's no room at the boat landing. But anyway, the habitat is ideal for bluebirds. They have the short grass areas. Let me get this little clicker thing out here. Yeah, the short grass areas like this here. My bluebird box is right there. The first time I put the box up the first year, it was early on when I took over this trail, around 2000 or so when I started getting into doing the bluebird trails. I had a triple nest in this box. Three different nest cycles went through there. I fledged, I think, 21 bluebirds out of that box the first year. Then the second year there was two or three bluebird hens that were fighting over the box. When that happens it's almost as bad as having wrens or house sparrow trouble really. They keep removing each others eggs or breaking them. They keep building nests over the other one's eggs. I got two out of it the second year. Ever since then it's pretty much become a tree swallow box. The beach and the lake are only about 150 yards away. The bluebirds have decided they like other areas of the park. I haven't had a bluebird nest in there, I think, in two or three years now. Anyway, it's still a slide that shows the ideal habitat of scattered trees, the mowed lawn. I keep the boxes far enough away from the wooded area here, because then house wrens would be attracted to it too much. I have to watch out for that at a state park. County parks are the same way. I have to kind of been careful with box placement. For instance, this one here which is one I found on -- Road, south of Madison. I think somebody put in a restored prairie, and a long the fence row probably 25-30 years ago, they put in this older style box that was popular back then. It was called the hill/lake box. You know, over the years, they obviously, stopped taking care of it. The prairie took hold and got kind of heavy, thick and tall. Some shrubbery grew up here. I'm guaranteeing you, if I had gotten out of the car and hopped the fence and looked inside there, it would probably either be a mouse nest or probably a wren nest. Those are pretty much what happens to these boxes that are left. The other one would be house sparrow. This one wasn't really in an area that I would expect to see house sparrows around, but a lot of times it's a little white-footed mouse that occupies those boxes when they're left alone. What they do is the old nest is in there, they just pile all their nest material on top. One of the things that we really like to encourage with the bluebird restoration group and now the trails we do for Madison Audubon is that every week we have somebody monitoring the boxes. I was talking about, I have the five different trails but I have four or five people that help me with the monitoring. This is the part that they do. Starting usually around-- It kind of depends upon when the nesting season starts, but around the first of April, anywhere to the second or third week of April, if you feel the nesting season is on it's way, once a week you go. You take a piece of paper and a pencil. Or nowadays a smart phone with a note-taking thing. You record what you find in the nest boxes. How many eggs are in there? If there's any chicks, what type of species is nesting in the box? You do that each week. If there's ever a house sparrow nest in there, house sparrows are not native, so we're allow to remove them. If there's a wren nest in there we don't take it out. If there's a tree swallow nest in there we don't take it out. But we just kind of keep track of all the different things. We want to make sure that the boxes we want producing bluebirds are doing the job. If they're not then we might move the box. That's the key thing about monitoring. At the end of the season, which is usually late August, we compile our information and we send it in to our data collection officer in Steven's Point. Then his gears get going and he starts to analyze all this stuff and try to figure out, you know, home many bluebirds fledged in the state, how many tree swallows there were, and things like that. Okay, the bluebird basics here. We got the female selects the box and builds a nest. The male defends the territory. Both guard the box and the nest. You know, I've read a lot of books on bluebirds. Sometimes they'll say that the male is just there to get the territory, the box, the female, and then once the eggs are laid he doesn't participate too much in the raising of the bluebirds. But I've found that, in most cases, the male bluebird is there taking food to the female. He's there when the chicks are hatched. He's really very active. But then I have had a few instances where I've watched boxes where the female is completely on her own. I've never figured out if the male may have been killed. Maybe a cat, or something happened to it. Or just exactly why that situation was. But most of the time when I'm monitoring a bluebird box the male and female are both very active. Then when they fledge out of the nest the male is very, very active in training the little bluebirds how to become big bluebirds. So he has his part. Here's a little bit about where to place the boxes. We mount them on metal poles. I tell you, when you belong to an organization with so many experts that can tell you everything you need to know when you're starting out with them. We were told early on that, when I got into this, that the conduit pole, if you wax it with car wax, that that will keep anything from climbing up the pole and getting into the bluebird box. This is usually cats of raccoons that you're trying to prevent. We still use conduit for mounting the boxes. But it when from 1/2" to 3/4" just because I don't need to put a piece of rebar in the ground and then put the pole over it. That was kind of a pain. If you ever had to move them they get stuck in the ground. Just recently we kind of discovered that the raccoons either went to school about how to climb these greasy poles, or waxed poles, because a lot of us started developing problems with raccoons raiding our boxes. A lot of us have gone to putting on coon guards. I'll talk about that a little bit later. One of the guys up in La Crosse, he always puts his nest boxes on a 'T' type fence post. He always puts a PVC sleeve over it. It goes down to the ground and all the way up to the box. He says he doesn't want any mice getting in there. He doesn't want anything climbing it. He's been doing it for 20 years and it's always worked. In one of the boxes that was right outside his front door two springs ago, the female laid five eggs. They disappeared. She came back and laid another five eggs. They disappeared. He had a friend that ran a video monitoring service and called him up. The guys says, well, let's put a camera on the box and we'll see what's going on there. Now this guy was actually video taping inside the nest box. He had about a 15 foot high pole that his video feed would go to. HE had an extra large box that the camera could sit in and do a wide angle view of the nesting. Then they put a video camera on the outside. They waited. Two nights later he got a nice video shot of this racoon hanging with it's foot from the roof, reaching inside and pulling the eggs right out of there. It climbed up that PVC stuff real easily. Pretty much, I think what happens is, over time, the elements of weather and everything make those less slippery. Those raccoons, like I said, they learn. Just like the squirrels learn how to get to your bird feeder. The raccoons learn on their own. We got facing the east, northeast and southeast directions. That's because in Wisconsin our west and northwest winds in the springtime are cold wind. You want to have that entrance box facing away from that so that the box is warmer for the female when she'd nesting in the springtime. The spacing of additional 100 yards. When I was picking up my nametag at the WHA booth that they have a guy kind of wrangled me and he got a couple of bluebird tips from me for free when he saw I was carrying around the nest box. He said he lives on the north side of Madison near the Lake Mendota area. I said, why don't you come to the bluebird talk? He said, my wife and I came together and we split up. She's doing that one. Anyway, he got a little bit of free advice from me about the bluebird. But one of the things he wanted to know was how far apart to put the boxes. We do 100 yards. That's because bluebirds have territories and we're trying to maximize the number of bluebirds we can get to the number of boxes that we put out. Now if I was in Minnesota speaking to their garden people or birding people, they would say take two boxes and put them here. Then go a 100 yards and put two more boxes. They really push the pairing of boxes there with the theory that the bluebird will take one box and another species, usually a tree swallow, will occupy the other one. And they both will live happily ever after. I've tried it, it sucks.

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We're the only state in the affiliates that pretty much promotes do not pair the boxes. We had a guy that used to do our data collection, Joe --. He was a good friend of mine that died a few years ago. He did extensive research from the data collection stuff that he did back in the late '90s about pairing boxes. He pretty much figured that the time you're spending on building a box and placing them around, if you do a single box every 100 yards you'll produce more bluebirds than if you try to do the pairing thing and please them. Now a lot of you people might just have a small property that you can't do the 100 yard thing on. You may have to go to doing a paired situation or probably closer than the 100 yards. If that gets you bluebirds and that's working for you, that's great. I'm not saying change that. I'm talking more like trails and setting up more than, say, two or three boxes. What the statewide group has decided is probably the best way to do it, the 100 yard rule. What I do when I set up a box, I always take a football with me. I get the box set up and I take the football and I throw it as far as I can, usually about 100 yards.

laughter

That's where I set the next one up. Okay, anyway, a tree nearby or so for the young to fly to. That's because they're not real great flyers when they first start out. You don't want them going to the ground where they might be able to get captured by a cat or a racoon or something. Then the entrance hole being 1-1/2". The key thing about that is it eliminates any starlings from trying to use your nest box. That's pretty much the best way to do it. Starling is another non-native species that competed heavily with the bluebird in the early days. Starlings probably cause, or woodpeckers today, more problems than any other species. Now they're not bothering the bluebirds because we've got the 1-1/2" hole thing. If you ever find a woods in an area that has a good colony of woodpeckers like hairy's or red bellies, you'll usually find there's a lot of starlings in that area too. That's because they occupy the nest that the woodpeckers leave. Or they wait until the woodpecker builds a nest and lays the eggs, then they go in and take it over. Some of these non-native species are really harmful to our native birds. Here's a hen sitting on a nest. Early on when I started doing bluebird trails I always carried a pocket digital camera around with me. If I saw her on a nest-- Most of the time they'll fly off of it or they'll hear you coming. I try to make a little bit of noise and alert them that I'm coming. They'll fly off the nest. But sometimes they'll go, I ain't budgin'. You've got to wait to find out how many eggs I'm going to get. I'm not going to leave. Then I just kind of close the box up, get my camera ready. I pop it open and take a picture so I can use it for a slide show. I'll find out next time I check a week from this time, if she's got three or four eggs in there. But you can see the nest is made out of nice, fine grassy material. That's fairly typical. It's almost like a robin nest, but they don't need the mud to hold it together. It's just the grass part without the mud. This is typical of what you'll find when you're checking the boxes. The blue eggs are pretty much normal, just like a robin's blue eggs. Again, the nest material swirling without any mud or anything in there. About 5% or 6% of hen bluebird lay white eggs. If they start laying white eggs, any of their offspring lay white eggs. It's a genetic thing that has to do with the last stage of egg development when the coloring gets put into it. Some hens don't have it. I had a couple of white laying hens about five years ago at the park. It's kind of funny because you can tell when they go from one box to another. When they have their second brood you find the white eggs again. When they have an offspring that stays in the park, you find out when you've got two females laying white eggs that you've got the offspring. Then they phase out. I haven't had one for about the last four years or so. It's not unusual. You almost think you've got a tree swallow nest when you see the white eggs in there, but tree swallows always line their nest with feathers. Once they lay the eggs they have this really thick mound of feathers they put over it. So if you ever checking a box and you see all these chicken feathers and duck feathers in there. I can almost guarantee you, every tree swallow nest that you look in has black and white striped feathers in it. It's from the breast of a male wood duck. Think about that one for a minute. I don't know how they get it, but they always have it. There's the young ones. They have a nice bright yellow throat. That's the bluebird that's begging for food there. They catch on after you do this once of twice that you're not the mom. They kind of know right away and they don't open their mouths for the pictures anymore. Occasionally I'll get an egg in the nest that's laid by a brown-headed cowbird. Anybody know about brown-headed cowbirds? They're kind of a black bird. The males have a nice brown head. Some of those females manage to get inside the entrance holes. Sometime the entrance holes get a little bit widened by a woodpecker in the wintertime. Sometimes they just as so diligent about getting an egg in the box. Usually a cowbird will remove a bluebird egg and lay one of her own in the nest box. They're a protected bird. They're a native bird. Legally, because they're protected by the Migratory Bird Act, you're not suppose to remove their eggs. You're not supposed to do anything to the brown-headed cowbird unless you have a permit. I usually let them go. The funny thing is that when you open the box and they start to open up like this you see the cowbird's throat is kind of a pinkish-orange and this one's bright yellow. You can just see. That cowbird chick gets so much food that it fledges about a week before the bluebird ones do. It gets huge in there. It goes out and lands on the ground and on the trees. The adult bluebirds go and feed that chick as well as taking care of their own. I've seen this happen with black-capped chickadees the same way. The chickadee development I figured was about five days behind their normal fledge date. With bluebirds I didn't notice it being quite that far back. With chickadee it really, really-- Those little chickadees were trying to keep that cowbird fed and happy. They're own got kind of set back with how long they were in the nest box and fledged. Here's three bluebird chicks, one of my gang at the Kegonsa State Park, probably about seven or eight years ago now. Bluebirds only live about three to four years in the wild. These guys probably have genetic offspring that are taking their place there. There's one that's left the box. This is one of my Stoughton City Park boxes. It's an excellent box. It's actually places near the park sign at Racetrack City Park. It's right where the cars park for soccer games and La Crosse. In the springtime it's really funny. I'd go to check the box and the parking lot's full. There's people yelling and screaming and everything. Bluebirds just go about their activity. They don't care. This was a bluebird from the first brood there. The female has a new brood inside the box with about four to five day-old chicks in there. I'm watching her go in there and feeding the young. This guy lands on the roof begging for food.

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She didn't do it, she didn't feed him at all. What's interesting though is I have seen young from the first brood come in with food and drop it in the box and feed the second brood. They pick up that quickly. Some of them will do that, start taking care of their younger brothers or sisters. Okay, so here's one of the charts that we produce from the Bluebird Restoration Group. We've been tracking this for quite awhile. I think it says '92 or '94 or something. It's when we stopped promoting paired boxes. Our bluebirds did really well from here to here. This is about when I joined the organization, by the way.

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We had a couple up and down springs now. This last year's spring was awful for bluebirds. April just didn't give them the type of weather they needed to get started nesting. By the time the bluebirds decided, okay, it's finally warm enough, there's insects. We can start nesting. The tree swallow and the house wrens were there. Boy, I tell ya. I never had so many eggs broken by wrens as I did last May. It was a disaster on most of my trails. But I still managed to fledge 72 bluebirds. It wasn't a complete lost year. Three years ago I produced 152, so that just shows you how different one season can go from the other. One of the other things that we keep track of is tree swallows. We want to make sure that another species isn't tumbling down as we're doing our bluebird work. We don't want to have anything affect another native species. We kind of track their numbers to see that they're kind of like even. They are. And then a number of boxes we track just so we can kind of keep track of, by increasing boxes, how much that's effecting our increasing the numbers here. I can tell you, from the organizations that belong to North American Bluebird Society, which BRA is one of the affiliates of, we've led the nation the five or six years in bluebird production. The other state that's really high is Nebraska. Minnesota is pretty good. I tell ya, it has a lot to do with the grass-roots organization and how well developed the state affiliates are. If they have a lot of activity, a lot of people that are really getting gung-ho and excited about bluebirds, those states seem to be doing better. And they have a better way of monitoring. Actually, we require so much on our form for the data research. Some just ask, how many bluebirds did you have? How many nest attempts? Or how many eggs you had, how many fledged. Our form is a little bit more detailed. But we're getting the information that we want about bluebirds. Now that I gave you the good news about our line going up, up, up in bluebird production, here's one of my boxes that the bluebird was trying to defend the box. A male house sparrow followed it in. House sparrows will kill the bluebirds inside the box. The house sparrow, when it's in the city it's a nice, chirpy little bird. It come to your bird feeder you look out and it's got a black bib. They are always in nice, little colonies and flocks. Yeah, that's great. But when you have a bluebird trail they want that next box and they're vicious. It's really hard to take care of a trail when you have a lot of problems with house sparrows. What I try to do is I try to set up my trails in areas where there aren't a lot of house sparrows if I can. Lake Kegonsa State Park doesn't have a lot of housing real close to the park, so there's not a lot of people feeding birds there in the perimeter of the park. If I get a house sparrow problem there it might be one rouge male. I call them rouges when they kind of show up. They really don't have much of a chance of attracting a female house sparrow at the park anyway just because of habitat and the location. They like to be around people more. They like to be around bird feeders for the free food. Anytime you put out a nest box with a 1-1/2" hole you can almost guarantee a house sparrow will show up within a day or two to claim it. They get so vicious that they'll follow a tree swallow in and they'll kill it. They peck the head until it's dead. In this case they killed one of my bluebirds. So when you get into doing bluebird trails seriously, you don't like house sparrows. Another thing is I work at Wild Birds Unlimited on the west side of Madison. I get a lot of people coming into the store saying, we still have bluebirds and it's January, it's February. We've got bluebirds. The conception is that bluebirds all leave the state of Wisconsin in October. The smart ones do anyway, so they don't have to live out these harsh winters we have up here. But this is a map from Cornell Labs where they do what they call the 'great backyard bird count.' It's next weekend, I believe. It's a four day period where, if you want, you can track how many birds are coming to your backyard feeders and you report it to Cornell. I just went and grabbed the results of the Eastern Bluebird. These are taken in February. Cornell puts all the information in. Wisconsin is right here, right there. You can see that bluebirds winter in the northern part of the country quite a bit. Not so much out in the plains areas, I see. This is all kind of east of the Mississippi River, I'd say. The dark green ones are 7 to 15 birds being reported. The light green ones are three to seven. You can see, some even up in Minnesota yet, some up in Green Bay. I've got a friend up in Green Bay. She has five or six every winter. They love her heated bird bath. She puts out mealworms for them. They're a hearty bird. Just like if you see robins in the wintertime. A lot of these bird are wintering over. Some of the reasons why, we used to tell people it's because our winters are milder. But after this winter we're not going to say that anymore. I don't remember how many sub-zero nights we've had, but boy, this has been a harsh winter. We've got a lot of invasive plants that have come into the state, particularly honeysuckle and buckthorn. They are producing the foods that these birds are eating during the winter. If you take a walk in a county park or a city park, even if you look in your back yard right now, you may find a shrub that's about 10 to 15 feet tall. I call it a shrub, it's actually maybe a small tree. It's not very full or attractive with branches or anything like that, but it may be loaded with really dark black berries that almost look like shriveled up grapes, dark purple grapes. I was snowshoeing at Kegonsa State Park last Sunday and heard some robins. I looked up and sure enough, there were three or four robins in a tree. I looked over and they were in a buckthorn tree. That's what they were feeding on. I snowshoed past them. They went up higher in a tree, then they came back down and started feeding on the berries. I've seen bluebirds eating the buckthorn berries. It's just some of these reasons besides having mealworms out there. People put them out in the wintertime. Having more nest boxes that out there for them to roost in at night when it's cold. Those are probably reasons why the bluebirds are sticking around more. When I did Christmas bluebird counts about 10, 12 years ago, I think statewide we may have had, maybe 100 that were reported from the different Christmas bird counts. That's several thousand now. It's a trend that's been going on now for the last ten years at least. I'm sure it's going to continue. Competitors for bluebirds. I kind of talked about some of these already. The non-native ones are the starling and the house sparrow. And the starling I already mentioned. We got rid of that with the 1-1/2" hole. Tree swallow are a native bird. They're a great bird, they fly, they're beautiful. They're very defensive of the box. When you monitor tree swallow boxes you know you're going to probably get dive-bombed and scolded. They have beautiful blue back, white belly. A lot of people think these are barn swallows. Barn swallows don't live in nest boxes. They make mud nests underneath bridges and overhangs and in barns. And the house wren, another bird that in the city people love to have. It sings a lot, it catches bugs. They're very nice housekeepers. They make a nice stick nest in the box. A lot of people enjoy wrens. But when you have a bluebird trail, again, if you have it anywhere near a shrub line or trees they're apt to come in and peck the eggs open. In a normal spring where we have our nice warmer-type weather in April. Not like last year where it was really wet and cold. The bluebirds will get a jump and get nesting and get their eggs laid. The wrens don't really come back until the 1st of May or the first part of May. The bluebird are on their way. In that situation it works great. But in times when the cold weather in April holds the bluebirds back, that's when you have these bad years where they break into a lot of eggs and stuff. One of the things I'll quickly point out while I'm talking about the house sparrow is my nest box. I have to bring it back to the microphone. Okay, this is an NABS-style box. NABS means North American Bluebird Society. It's kind of their design. Lauren -- did a lot of testing, and this was the nest box that he really liked. It's got an oval hole. I think Lauren did a round hole, a 1-1/2" round. The oval hole is something that the Peterson box-- A guy from Minnesota developed a triangle box called the Peterson box. He came up with the oval hole. He thought a lot of woodpecker holes kind of resembled it or something. I've got all these boxes on the trail, with round holes, oval holes. No bluebirds have ever left me a message saying they likes one over the other.

laughter

But it's nice to have a box that opens up nice and big when you get a bluebird out of there.

chirping

It's a nice call. You love to hear that in the springtime when you go out to your trail and you start hearing that call. That's my little bluebird buddy. One of the things you can do with house sparrows, you constantly remove the nest from the box. It'll take you about five to six weeks before they give up. Now if you're starting out in April your pretty much close to June. You lost the first brood cycle for the bluebird if that happens. But a guy in Iowa by the name of Floyd --, he developed this little mouse trap thing that's called a -- trap. It goes inside the front of the box. There are two screws to hold it in place. It's got a little door you put down, and a little lever that you hook it, just like a mouse trap would hook. You don't have to put any cheese in it though.

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So it's set right like that, okay? You would be watching this box when you have trap in there. You don't want to set it and then come back a week later. Another bird besides a house sparrow could get in there and you don't want the non-house sparrow to get caught in there. So you close the box like this. Now you go stand maybe 100 yards away or you can check another box and come back. You want to look and see if the house sparrow comes in there. Usually you do this at a box where you know the house sparrows are being a nuisance. When he goes in there he sets that trap. Now you see that red dot showing in the entrance hole. Now you know you've got a bird in there. Ideally you've trapped the house sparrow. What you do with the house sparrow after you trap it is up to you. If you want to know what I'm doing with mine, if they're a persistent problem house sparrow or if it's killed one of my bluebirds, come up after my talk and I can go over how you get it out of the box. You always want to make sure that you're trapping a house sparrow. A little trick that a guy in Texas told me was that if you take some white chicken feathers and throw them on the ground when you go up to the box and set the trap the male house sparrow cannot resist grabbing those feathers and flying right to the box and putting them in there. He says you don't have to wait quite as long to trap them if you do that. I didn't really get around to it because I didn't have to. They pretty much go into it right away. So that's one way of dealing with house sparrows. Remove the nest constantly or set a trap of some sort. Or move the box to an area where you don't think house sparrows will be a problem. That's what I said in the beginning. I want to avoid any of these conflicts and the time it takes to deal with these things. Okay? One of the things about house sparrows, they are non-native, they are not protected by law, they're very difficult to get rid of. They adapt to almost any habitat. Like I said, they usually like to be near buildings or barns. The rule used to be if you put your box a quarter of a mile away from the barn out in the country they wouldn't bother you. I've been at a half a mile and three-quarters of a mile in the middle of nowhere and they show up. I took over McCarthy Park County trail between Cottage Grove and Sun Prairie a couple of years ago now. It's a grassland park that the county maintains. There's a cattle farm right next to it, so I knew I was going to have problems, with the cows being there the house sparrows would be there too. I purposely put my boxes pretty far away from where the cows were. Even last year some of my boxes, I mean they weren't anywhere near a farm or a house. It had to be a mile away. There's those rouge male house sparrows that just don't get it. They think they can sit on top of that box. They'll sing and sing and sing. I noticed that these guys didn't put any starter materials in the nest box which is typically what house sparrows do to claim the box. I kind of thought, I won't trap them. I'll just let it and see what next week, when I come back, see what happens. Eventually they just left on their own. I think they sat there and they sang and sang and they thought they had this perfect box in the middle of nowhere. Hey, there were no chicks around for them. So they gave up. I didn't have to do anything with them. That's another one of those things, if you put the boxes where you think it's a good spot where you won't have house sparrows that can be a problem. The bottom line is they destroy bluebird eggs and they kill adults or young. I've had them kill chicks in the nest too. You get chicks that are about three weeks old, a day or two away from fledging, and along come a male house sparrow. He goes in and kills them to take over the box on you. Um, I tell ya. If you're attracting birds to your yard or area that you want to attract birds to and you're feeding them and also putting up houses for them, what are some of the things you can do so that you don't have house sparrows so much? In my yard I pretty much try to stick with-- I live down in Stoughton in the city, not out in the country. There's house sparrows in my neighborhood. I find if I put out the nyger for the finches, black oil sunflower for the cardinals, finches and grosbeaks and jays. And sunflower for the cardinals, doves, finches-- or safflower I mean, and grosbeaks. I have a tendency not to have too many problems with house sparrows occupying my bird feeders that much. If I put any cracked corn or millet down, or if I buy a cheap finch mix. Now that I work at Wild Birds Unlimited I don't do that.

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But if I did they tend to come around and eat that kind of seed. There's some fillers in there or they're putting in some millet or something like that. But I've got to tell you, I have seen set ups where house sparrows, if you put out straight safflower, they devour it. I've seen them devour nyger seed from a tube feeder that's meant to for gold finches. Some house sparrows are adapting. Especially when there's a large flock of them. They will just about eat anything. This is my basic guideline. It works most of the time. What I've found with dealing with bluebirds, wrens, squirrel problems or raccoon problems is there's never a 100% thing that works. It's usually something that's pretty effective, you find what you like, what works best for you. All right, feed meal worms and a bird bath. Meal worms can get pretty expensive, but having a bird bath out there is great. Even if it's a heated bird bath. There are a lot of people that get bluebirds in the wintertime just because they have a bird bath out. Then they feel they have to feed them because they're afraid they're not eating anything. Believe me, the birds can survive. They're not staying because people are putting out meal worms, because you have to help them make it through the winter. I've got another quick little story coming up here on my monitoring. I'm getting a little tricky with my Power Point thing here. This is a scene that came two summers ago. My bluebird trail at Kegonsa State Park had three or four chicks in it that were just about ready to fledge. When I pulled up on my motorcycle I look over and there's a tree swallow sitting on the box. I thought-- I checked my record and the bluebirds aren't done for another four or five days. I go and look inside the box and I've got a dead bluebird, a tree swallow egg and a live chick sitting here. I can't tell what the heck happened except that these tree swallows just got tired of waiting for the bluebird to finish up and they tried to take over the nest box. I thought, where's this male bluebird that's supposed to be defending the territory? I guess he was out finding some food or something because they weren't around. What to do? I happened to have my motorcycle with my camera bag. I always have to have something to photograph nature when I'm out there. I put a little bit of grass in my camera bag. I stuffed the little bird-- You can't hardly see it. It's down in that grassy material. I remembered that I had a nest box about a half a mile back in the park that had five chicks in it that were only about a day or two off of what the age of this one was. So she went for a ride on my motorcycle.

laughter

In to the park, and while I was getting the nest box set up for her she climbed out of the little bag thing. I came back and she's sitting on top of the bag looking at me. Good thing I had my camera with me. Anyway, it's the perfect biker chick.

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When I drive around the state going to different birding organizations and doing talks or just bird watching myself, I drive around and I always have my camera with me. I like taking a lot of bird photos and just photography in general. Here's some of the things that I've come across. I call it the Hall of Shame. If your nest box is up and it looks nice but it's upside down-- You've got to get out there and put another nail or screw into it. This is one that was by Fox Lake Golf Course. The box flipped up and opened up, and a robin took it. You got the wrong species of thrush! You're supposed to be helping the bluebirds. This I call the bend over. This is an awful farm that south of Stoughton that almost every fence post the guys got a nest box. The house sparrows are just loving it. They just take over. This is up in the Steven's Point area by Buena Vista Grasslands. The guy that does our data collection, Kent--, it's up in his territory. Of course I had to take a picture of it and tell him, boy, you guys don't know how to mount a bluebird box up there. This is actually part of the same guy's set up. He's got double houses. There's a hole up here and a hole up here, a hole there and a hole there. It's sort of like having a two-hole outhouse I guess, or something.

laughter

But anyway, like I said, he's getting a lot of house sparrows. That's the end of my slide show. Thank you very much.

applause