Sunday, 9th January 2022: surveying and cleaning the nest boxes in Adel Woods

It is 12 years since the Friends of Adel Woods made and put up our first nest boxes in Adel Woods under the tutelage of Steve Joul, senior ranger with Leeds City Council. Since then we have surveyed them every year – except for last year when we were in a Covid 19 lockdown. This year, your correspondent was intrigued to find out how our feathered friends have fared without their annual spring clean in January 2021.

Most of the nestboxes are the tit boxes which you can see high up in trees throughout the woods. However, we also put a number of robin boxes out of sight within thick holly bushes – not a pleasure to survey! Robin boxes differ from tit boxes in that robins like to nest in a box with a large open front. This means that they have to be placed somewhere hard to find, to keep them safe from predators like magpies, woodpeckers and squirrels.

It was rather “parky” as we met in Old Leo’s carpark at 10 am, but fortunately the weather warmed up surprisingly quickly and we had a very enjoyable and successful day. In the morning there were eight of us including Steve.

We followed our usual route, heading along Crag Lane towards King Lane and taking the first turn left into Alwoodley Plantation where we surveyed our first boxes. We then made our way through the plantation, turning left at the practice rugby ground to come back to Crag Lane. We then continued along Crag Lane to the picnic area surveying nest boxes along the way.

By then it was lunchtime and we broke off for lunch after returning along Crag Lane and cleaning and surveying “Tina’s nest box”, a woodcrete nest box near the entrance to Old Leo’s car park.

After an enjoyable lunch break, five of us resumed our survey, making our way down the Meanwood Valley Trail from the picnic area towards Adel Pond. We finished as dusk fell at about 4.20 pm.

So what did we discover?

In all, we surveyed twenty two nestboxes today. Most of the tit boxes had been used. Of the three robin nest boxes we surveyed, only one had been used for nesting – by a pair of great or blue tits!

Blue tits and great tits nest once a year and do not re-use old nests and so, as expected, we found that most of the nestboxes contained two nests, one (from Spring 2021) on top of an earlier one from 2020.

We were surprised to find that most of the lower nests from 2020 had been “processed”, presumably by insects, almost to a kind of dust. The photograph below shows the difference between the condition of the earlier nest (on the right) and last year’s nest (on the left).

As is usual a number of the nestboxes contained one or two unhatched eggs – as in the photograph above. The nest on the left also contained a number of droppings, indicating that the nest box has been used for roosting by adult birds since the breeding season.

One of the things which we find each year is that tits like to use coloured man-made fibre in building their nests. In the photograph above, we can see blue, green and white fibre, but we also found plenty of bright orange fibre in other nests. We speculate that these fibres must have been collected from lost tennis balls, or possibly discarded clothing – though we have never found that number of tennis balls, or much clothing with those colours!

Usually we find one or two nuthatch nests, but none of the nestboxes surveyed today had been used by nuthatches in 2020 or 2021. Nuthatch nests are very different from tit nests as they are made from bark chips – looking rather like a bowl of bran flakes – rather than moss and grass. And it is usually possible to tell from the outside that a box has been used by nuthatches because they seal up any gaps between the lid and the box or in the sides of the box with mud.

There were two sad finds, reminding us that life in the wild can be harsh. One nest box contained twelve unhatched eggs. Another contained the skeletons of eight well developed chicks. Presumably, in each case the adult tits had fallen prey to a sparrowhawk or suffered some other sad fate.

We are completing our survey on Sunday the 23rd January. See our website for details! In the meantime, here are some photos of today’s activities.