Bluebird Monitor Training: Knowledge Can Come Out of the Blue!

 By Everix Machan, UWEC Writing Intern

On Saturday, February 21st, Beaver Creek welcomed local bird lovers for their Eastern Bluebird Monitor Training! 

Beaver Creek has offered bluebird monitoring for over ten years now, and the practice still has a huge draw. Last year, 51 bluebird boxes were logged, including 192 bluebirds born and fledged, meaning they are able to fly! This year, we hope for an even more successful year for our feathered friends, with volunteers surveying all of our routes in the county. 

At the training, volunteers received a monitoring toolkit and training on how to best track the data collected through NestWatch, a free program developed by Cornell Lab of Ornithology through Cornell University. You can download it right onto your phone! This monitoring lasts from March to August while our local birds nest and raise their young. Through our training, volunteers learned to care for nest boxes to protect bluebirds, and through NestWatch, important research is collected by civilians about tens of thousands of Eastern bluebirds a year, especially throughout the Midwest and Eastern United States. Because these bluebirds nest in tree cavities in grasslands or open woodlands, they aren’t as visible as other nests, so it is important to have as many volunteers monitoring as possible!

While we can help our bluebirds by monitoring their nests and young, a nest can “fail” in many ways, including abandonment, inability to find food, encountering predators, or bad weather displacing or destroying nests. Bluebirds are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, meaning we are not allowed to touch nests without a permit, but our nest monitor volunteers take precautions to avoid stressing out our local feathered friends or leading predators to the nests. To prevent nest failure in our county, we can put up predator guards on poles where there are nest boxes and check on the boxes before storms to ensure they will stay dry and intact. Finally, it helps to keep cats inside. Even cats who are well-fed hunt by nature, and you might not even know it if they don’t take the prey back to you!

If you’re interested in learning more about identifying bluebirds or any other feathered friends, feel free to download the Merlin Bird ID app, developed by the Cornell Lab, which can help you identify birds by their plumage and calls. Also, keep an eye out for other bluebird-related events this spring and summer, including April’s bluebird house building program and May’s bluebird watercolor paint and sip!

If you’d like to get involved with Eastern Bluebird Monitoring, but missed the training, feel free to email our wonderful AmeriCorps Avian Field Technician, Santiago Tabares Erices at santiago@beavercreekreserve.org!