By Danny Bay
With encouraging results, volunteers in Chaffee County have continued to help build the population of mountain and western bluebirds through a statewide initiative called the Colorado Bluebird Project.
“When we started this effort, Colorado was reporting about 100 nest attempts each year. Now that number is well over 1000 each year,” said Kevin Corwin, Director of the Colorado Bluebird Project.
Active for five years, the project has aimed to work with volunteers along various routes in the state to build and monitor nest boxes that provide suitable conditions for bluebirds whose decline has been of concern.
According to Corwin, their decline is attributed to loss of habitat, insecticides and competition from European starlings and English or house sparrows. Corwin said by building a correct box, many of these attributions are combated, but not all.
“If you properly design a box, starlings can’t get in a bluebird box, but sparrows will get in there. Sparrows can nest anywhere. They’re very aggressive. If they really want the box that the bluebird is in, they will kill the adults and build a nest over the corpse,” Corwin said, adding that the bluebirds will defend their box but that they are usually outmatched.
For this reason, Corwin said that in comparison to previous efforts, the project has been re-energized with new goals, one of which is a focus on monitoring.
“We actively check boxes once a week,” he said. From these observations, if a volunteer has found that another species has taken over the box, the hole of the box may be temporarily plugged or the box may be moved to a more suitable location for the bluebird, such as grasslands.
In addition to monitoring for problems, Corwin said that volunteers also monitor when eggs are laid, the number of eggs in the clutch, how many hatch and how many fledge, or, leave the box. These results for every box are sent by the volunteers to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Several things such as nest productivity and mortality rates can be determined and measured at the lab.
Another goal that the project established was education. Corwin said that they use a one-hour program to present to people interested in establishing a nest box.
“It wasn’t hard to get people excited about it,” said Jena Sanchez of the Colorado Division of Wildlife in Salida. “I have volunteer leaders in each community. And it’s an amazing project that’s taken off from there,” she said.
As the volunteer coordinator for Southeaster Colorado, Sanchez has helped volunteers monitor 20 bluebird boxes in Salida, 20 boxes in various sites by the headwaters around Buena Vista and 70 boxes in Howard.
“I think people love them for their beautiful colors. It gets them hooked right away,” Sanchez said.
Over the past fours years of work on the project, Sanchez said that the volunteer hours have more than quadrupled and she expects that there will be a record amount of hours logged by the end of this season.
Linda Geiling, a volunteer for four years, has put in over 100 hours of volunteer work every year, according to Sanchez.
“When I retired I needed something to do so I stopped by the office,” Geiling said, “I had been interested in the western bluebird so I put up some boxes and then people began to talk to me. They would say, ‘Hey, did you see? We have bluebirds again.’”
Geiling said that she was originally unaware that she should monitor the boxes. But after volunteering, she learned it was okay to look in and observe the progress of the birds and their babies.
“I’ll walk up to the box and tap on it, which is an opportunity for the mother to fly out, and then I’ll look in. It was really exciting when I saw the first eggs of the babies. They grow up so fast. They’re born with no feathers and by 14 days, they leave,” she said.
But Geiling said that sometimes a routine check of the boxes does not always leave her quite so happy.
“I had an incident with a box next to a friend’s house. One day I checked the box and the eggs were dead, the mother was on them and she was dead and on top was the father with his wings spread. It was like he was trying to protect the box. So we took away the box. It wasn’t a good location. It was too close to a house,” she said.
Geiling said she has learned how to provide a better habitat and how to better protect the bluebirds from predators but that some problems still occur with wasps, snakes and other birds.
But despite such difficulties, Geiling has helped expand bluebird routes by putting up a total of 82 boxes. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Colorado has documented 5,637 nests and Geiling said that she is optimistic about the nest count. “There’s a good chance to increase or maybe even improve this year,” she said.
In addition to her efforts, Geiling said that she helps people become aware of the project by giving information through a PowerPoint presentation. It includes a video from a camera inside a box that shows eggs hatching. She said that she has held box-building workshops and that if people need, she will even make them a box.
“I’ve got it down to a science. It takes me only about 10 minutes,” she said, adding that anyone can build and monitor a box. “It’s easier than a lot of people think,” she said.
And for Geiling, volunteering comes with the most fruitful reward.
“Just to see them keeps me going. If the environment is healthy, the bluebirds and butterflies are healthy too. I look forward to it all the time and I call them ‘my birds,’” she said.
(Originally published in The Chaffee County Times)
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