Ornithology club installs new nesting boxes
New nest boxes installed in several Off-Island parks aim to help songbirds find safe places to raise their young, while allowing bird-lovers to observe and count migratory birds.
The Vaudreuil-Soulanges Ornithology Club has installed 15 new nesting boxes in St-Lazare’s StRobert Park and Pointe-du-Moulin Historic Site in Notre-Damede-l’Île-Perrot. The club has also approached the city of Vaudreuil-Dorion about installing boxes in three locations later this year, near the public library, Montée Cadieux and Baie Vaudreuil.
Club president Martin Leduc said the locations were chosen because they are areas that already attract a lot of waterfowl and other birds, indicating they are safe places to nest.
“Birds attract birds,” he said. “It’s like people, we are more comfortable walking down a busy street than a deserted alley. If there are a lot of birds, they know it is a safe place.”
The boxes have been built specifically to attract two species of birds whose numbers are in danger of declining due to habitat loss: tree swallows and eastern bluebirds.
Tree swallows nest from mid-May to early July and lay between four to seven eggs. They have iridescent blue feathers on the back with a white breast and grey wings. The male eastern bluebird is a brilliant royal blue with an orange-and-white breast, while the female’s colouring is a more muted grey-blue.
Eastern bluebirds nest between February and September, laying three to five eggs at a time. Mother birds can lay more than one clutch in a season, leaving the father to care for the newly hatched babies while she goes off to build a second nest.
Both tree swallows and the eastern bluebird make their nests in cavities within dead trees at the edge of a meadow-like area. Tree swallows also like to be near water, as they forage for flying insects. While both birds fill nest boxes with soft grass and pine needles, tree swallows also like to line their nests with feathers, straw and sometimes even bits of trash like scraps of cloth or plastic, rubber bands, or tinsel. The bluebirds’ eggs are a striking pale powder blue, while tree swallow eggs are a pure white.
The Ornithology Club hopes the nest boxes will help boost the number of tree swallows and eastern bluebirds in the area. In the case of the eastern bluebird, in the early 1980s, the once-common bird had become frighteningly rare, but in the past 25 years the population has rebounded by about 50 per cent thanks to the installation of nest boxes.
“The problem is these birds will nest in a cavity in a dead tree, but you need a dead tree that’s right beside an open space,” Leduc said. “For the bluebirds, it’s got to be a field. It’s a bird of field, not a bird of forest.”
Leduc said because trees of this type are often found near fields or houses, they are often cut down so they don’t fall over and damage crops or buildings, leaving the birds without a place to nest.
“Vaudreuil-Soulanges is getting so developed that space is getting crunched for the birds to have places to go,” he said.
Volunteers from among the Ornithology Club’s 100 members are keeping notes on which birds are visiting the nest boxes, as well as their behaviour, so they can see whether they have successfully attracted nesting birds. At the end of the season, volunteers will clean out all the old nesting material from the boxes so they are clean and fresh for the following season.
Leduc said for too many people, birdsong is a background noise that they don’t even really notice. He hopes that when they see bird activity at the nest boxes, more people will start paying attention.
“Birds are in our backyards and everywhere,” Leduc said. “You just have to look up and notice.”
More information on the Ornithology Club and local birding resources is available on the club’s website at sites.google.com/site/ornithovs.