Tag Archives: Meanwood Valley Trail

This was the second day of our annual nest box survey. To find out more, have a look at our blog post for day one, the 24th January, and our blog post of the 28th January summarising what we found.

Sunday morning

Another dire weather forecast for today and at 8 am it was raining hard. After exchanges of messages, it was agreed that we would meet as agreed at 9.45 and make a decision whether to go ahead at that time.

By 10 am six of us including Steve Joul and yours truly had gathered, and as the rain was becoming intermittent we set off into the woods at 10.30 am.

Our starting point today was nest box 42 just by Adel Pond, and so we made our way there along Crag Lane and then down to the Cricket Pavilion. On the path down to the Slabbering Baby we paused to remove a small tree which had fallen across the path overnight.

When we surveyed box 42, we found it contained a tit nest and one unhatched egg.

It is quite hard to say whether any particular nest box was used by great tits or by blue tits as their nests are made with similar materials and are very similar in appearance. The best indicators are the size of the entrance hole to the nest, and the size of any eggs left in the nest.

Our nest boxes have varying hole sizes: 25mm, 28mm and 32 mm. Blue tits are smaller than great tits and can get in through a 25mm hole while great tits can’t, so if the nest box has a 25mm hole, we can say it was used by blue tits. The larger holes are suitable for both blue tits and great tits.

Both blue tit eggs and great tit eggs are creamy coloured with brown speckles. However, they differ slightly in size. Different authorities give different sizes, but the Woodland Trust says that blue tit eggs are 1.6 x 1.2 cm in size, while great tit eggs are 1.8 x1.4 cm in size. It is difficult to measure these sizes accurately and there is of course variation between eggs of the same species.

We surveyed a further five nest boxes going down the Meanwood Valley Trail before lunch, leaving ten for the afternoon.

Sunday afternoon

The weather was much better in the afternoon and we managed to survey all the remaining nest boxes, save for one which we could not find.

Our most exciting find of the afternoon was in box 31. It was quite difficult to open the lid, and when we opened it we found that the problem was caused by a mass of fibrous material holding the lid shut. Steve immediately identified this as the cocoons of the wax moth. If you look at the photograph above you can see that the moth larvae have used the wood of the box to make the cocoons.

Steve prophetically said that there would be a bee’s nest because wax moth larvae eat the wax of bees nests, and sure enough, as we opened the nesting material, we found the remains of a bumblebee nest. It is the blue-green material in the centre of the photograph above.

As we examined the material further we discovered a very sleepy hibernating queen tree bumblebee. We identified her by the ginger brown top to her thorax and white tail. We disturbed her as little as possible, closed the nest material up, and carefully placed all the material in the dry hollow of a tree.

The nest box tells quite a story. Firstly, a pair of blue tits or great tits nested and raised their brood. Then a queen bumblebee moved in and built a nest and produced a colony of bees. Next the wax moths moved in and consumed the wax, honey and pollen in the beehive – moths do not eat the bee larvae or adult bees. Finally, a queen tree bumblebee born into the bee colony hibernated in the nest box.

We finally completed this afternoon’s survey at about 4.15.

To find out how many of our nest boxes provided a home to our local population of blue tits and great tits, have a look at our blog entry for Wednesday the 28th January.

Join Friends of Adel Woods

We hope that you have enjoyed reading about our activities and would be delighted if you would like to join us.

Friends of Adel Woods were formed in 2009 to help maintain Adel Woods and encourage people to enjoy them. We meet one weekend morning a month to carry out various jobs or ”work parties”, and we also put on educational events such as bat walks, fungal forays and birdsong walks.

We are a very friendly group and welcome new members who want to help preserve our special woods, enjoy fresh air and exercise in the woods, and make new friends. 

If you would like to take part in our activities, keep an eye on our Home Page. 

You don’t need to book to come along to one of our work “parties”: just come along on the day.

If you would like to join our email mailing list, please get in touch by leaving a comment on this website – you should be able to see a comment box at the bottom of this page.

A lovely day for part two of our annual nest box clean and survey. This morning we had a team of six and we decided to complete our survey by starting at the Seven Arches and making our way up the Meanwood Valley Trail.

When we reached the Seven Arches we found a huge tree had been blown over by the recent high winds, but were rewarded by a fine view of the aqueduct following recent clearance work carried out by David Preston and his team of Meanwood Valley Volunteer Rangers.

The morning session….

This blog post will focus on what we found during our work today. You can find a lot of information about the purpose of cleaning the nest boxes, the birds that use them, and the kind of things we find, in yesterday’s blog entry, which can be found here. 

This morning we cleaned and surveyed twelve tit boxes and one treecreeper box.

Of the twelve tit boxes, ten contained tit nests (of which three at least were blue tit nests), one contained a nuthatch nest, and we don’t seem to have made a record of what we found in the twelfth. The treecreeper box contained a lot of leaves indicating it had been used by a squirrel for roosting.

Nuthatch nests are very different from tit nests. Nuthatches will use tit boxes but usually plaster around any gaps with mud, and rather than using moss, grass and feathers as nesting material, nuthatches use material chips of bark, so the nest looks like a bowl of branflakes! The nest we found today was sparse and there was not a lot of material so it is possible it was not completed. You can see a better example of a nuthatch nest in one of our wooden nest boxes photographed in January 2019 here.

The treecreeper box is a bit unusual.  Treecreepers are so called because they creep up the side of tree, looking for bugs to eat. They nest high up in small gaps behind the bark of trees, and the tree creeper nest box is intended to offer something similar to the gap behind bark.  It is about twice the depth of a tit box, and the entrance is on the side of the box, near the bark of the tree. We have found a tit nest in our treecreeper box in previous years, but this year we found a lot of leaves indicating that it had been used for roosting by a squirrel. You can see a photograph of the treecreeper box here

One first this year was that we found a large amount of “sawdust” in box 39, and a large hole in the back of the box. Since the back of the box was against the trunk of the tree, the hole could not have been made from the outside by a woodpecker and it must have been made from the inside by a woodmouse.

We retired for lunch, a piece of Christmas cake and a comfort break at about 1.25 pm.

The afternoon session….

This afternoon, starting from just below the Slabbering Baby, we made our way up the Meanwood Valley Trail and surveyed the final seven nest boxes – six tit boxes and one robin box.

The robin box had not been used. The tit boxes had all been used though one nest appeared not to have been completed. One nest contained five unhatched eggs and another four unhatched eggs. However, since great tits lay seven to nine eggs and blue tits eight to twelve eggs, the nests may well have been successful.

Friends of Adel Woods made and put up our wooden boxes under the tuition of Steve Joul in January 2010 and January 2011. We also purchased and put up a number of woodstone boxes in 2013. The woodstone boxes are made of a mixture of cement and sawdust. The advantages of woodstone boxes is that they do not rot and are usually easier to clean. On the other hand, they are very heavy!

In summary

Yesterday and today we surveyed and cleaned out forty one nest boxes – thirty six tit boxes, four robin boxes and one treecreeper box. Apart from one nest box, for which we do not seem to have made a record, all of the tit boxes were used last Spring. One of the tit boxes was used by a pair of nuthatches. None of the robin boxes had been used by robins, but two had been used by tits for nesting and two by squirrels for roosting. The treecreeper box had been used by a squirrel for roosting.

Thank you to everyone who helped over the weekend: thanks to Steve for letting us use his ladder; and thanks to Andrew who transported the ladder to Alwoodley!

About Friends of Adel Woods

Friends of Adel Woods were formed in 2009 to help maintain Adel Woods and encourage people to enjoy them. We meet one morning a month to carry out various jobs or “work parties”, and we also put on educational events.  We are a very friendly group and welcome new members who want to help preserve our special woods, enjoy fresh air and exercise in the woods and make new friends. Please get in touch by leaving a comment on this website if you would like to take part in our activities.