May 6th, 2013

In the movie Field of Dreams, Shoeless Joe Jackson tells Kevin Costner’s character that if he builds a baseball field, a bunch of long-dead ghost baseball greats will come to play there.

In our case, we hope that building nest boxes may attract cavity-nesting birds to our fields and forests.  This week at the Blair OEE Centre, that’s exactly – and unexpectedly – what happened.

I took down a couple of old boxes that squirrels had chewed up, making the entrance holes too large.  Small birds will shun such boxes because the large hole would allow predators to get their eggs, their young or themselves.  I cut  new fronts for the boxes and drilled  new holes one and one-eighth inches in diameter – just the size chickadees are known to prefer.  On Thursday, grade 7 students from Lester B. Pearson PS helped to re-mount the boxes – one in it’s original location in a stand of aspen, and the other down in the cedar swamp (see previous post).  Today – Monday – I stopped to point out the new digs to grade 7 students from Woodland Park P.S., and was amazed to find inside a bed of moss with a lining of grass and feathers, the trademark materials of the black-capped chickadee.  So a neglected old box had sat unused for two seasons, and within days of it’s retro-fit had been deemed the perfect residence by a pair of local birds.

If you build it, they will come…

[wpvideo FjALyN2P]