Greensville birder’s barn swallow shed is taking flight
Donations for Johnson Tew Park project take off, local union also lending a hand
Greensville resident Glenn Meldrum is no longer flying solo on his bid to build a nesting shed for barn swallows at nearby Johnson Tew Park, and is now readying to land the project.
He says efforts to raise $25,000 for the project floundered for about two years because he lacked the charitable status to issue tax receipts and didn’t want to take public donations in case he couldn’t reach his goal.
But that all changed last fall when Meldrum connected with the Hamilton Naturalists’ Club, which is a registered charity and offered to take donations for the shed. A Hamilton Spectator story in December helped spread the word and funding took off.
“I went from zero to $16,500 as of Jan. 31,” he said during a recent chat at the 15-hectare park, hailed as the city’s first arboretum when it opened in the fall of 2017.
Meldrum said people have contributed between $10 and $500, but the biggest cash infusion came after he applied for funding from Hydro One Networks and the utility donated $10,000 in memory of a late manager.
More good news followed when LIUNA Local 837 offered to have preapprenticeship students build the shed and he said he hopes it will be installed in September, after barn swallows have migrated south for the winter.
Meldrum said the project includes an interpretive sign on the birds, designated a species of special concern in Ontario because their numbers fell by 65 per cent between 1970 and 2019.
As their name suggests, barn swallows like to nest in open barns and similar human structures, and their decline is attributed to several factors, including pesticides, a decline in the flying insects they eat and the loss of barns to urban development.
“They have a very limited source of nesting,” Meldrum said. Johnson Tew Park, named after the late West Flamborough reeve and school trustee, is an ideal spot for the shed, he added, because it was once part of the Tew family’s dairy farm, “where there used to be barn swallows.”
Riccardo Persi, business manager for LIUNA Local 837, said he contacted Meldrum after seeing the Spec article because he likes nature and the shed seemed like a perfect project for preapprenticeship students at the union’s training centre in Grimsby.
He said LIUNA will also donate some materials on top of all labour, including digging and pouring concrete for the foundations and columns for the floorless shed, which will be built at the training centre and trucked to the park.
“The blueprints are nothing complicated, but give a kid who’s 17 or 18 years old and wants to get into construction an idea of what a blueprint looks like. It’s a ground-level startup of what you’d see on a construction site,” Persi said.
“It’s got a foundation, you’re doing cutting, you’re measuring. You’re building a small house and all the things you’d be doing.”
The barn swallow shed is Meldrum’s third project at Johnson Tew Park, which he said he visits daily. The avid naturalist and his brother built 16 nesting boxes on their own dime for eastern bluebirds and tree swallows that the city helped install six years ago by pounding in supporting posts.
Twenty-three baby bluebirds and 64 tree swallows fledged — or left — the boxes last year, he said, noting the park’s wide-open spaces are perfect for tree swallows because they feed on flying insects. Bluebirds favour those on the ground.
The retired autoworker created a pollinator garden two years ago, planting butterfly milkweed, stiffleaved goldenrod, wild strawberries, prairie coneflower and other plants favoured by butterflies and bees, again using his own money.