Despite torrential rain over night, producing streams in the woods where your correspondent had never seen them before – including a stream running down the path leading from the hospice woodland field down to Old Leo’s – it was a lovely morning and a handful of us joined Steve Joul at 10 am to clean and survey the FOAW nest boxes.
Taking an hour for lunch, we managed to survey all the tit boxes north of Old Leo’s and down the Meanwood Valley Trail to the Slabbering Baby, and all of the robin boxes before the light began to fail at 4pm. We cleaned them out, gave them a spray of disinfectant (harmless to wildlife), and reinstated them. We replaced a couple of damaged ones.
As usual, the robin boxes were largely unused, and the ones which had been used had been used by tits.
The tit boxes had almost all been used – by tits. Disappointingly, none of the nest boxes had been used by nuthatches. Many of the nest boxes contained unhatched eggs and we measured these to see if we could identify whether they were great tit or blue tit eggs.
Unusually, we found dead adult birds in two of the nest boxes – a blue tit in one and a wren in the other. They were only recently deceased and it is likely that they were using the nest boxes for roosting but died in the recent cold weather.
We still had all the nest boxes to clean out from the Slabbering Baby down to the Seven Arches. See our next post!
Friends of Adel Woods 