Bluebird Nesting Boxes

With the little man at my side, there is always an adventure afoot! This has been a lot of fun and I've certainly enjoyed it, hoping that the little man thinks back on some of these things when he's older and appreciates them as much as I do.

With one of the adventures we were on, we stumbled upon a pretty big field that had a whole bunch of nesting boxes posted in the ground all over the place! This was cool as we usually see a bird house or two here and there when we are out but it's more on the people who are living in the area than it is these official, biologist-installed boxes!

The bluebird is one of the birds that apparently was having a hard time around here for a while for whatever reason, there was likely habitat destruction of some kind. Thankfully though, with the help of the biologists and other locals throughout the region, the bluebird is starting to bounce back in population!

Just this past summer my wife's uncle in Southern New Hampshire had said that he's seen the bluebirds flying around in the morning looking for food when he's sitting out there enjoying his morning coffee which is cool because this was way before we were walking in this area and seeing these bluebird nesting boxes.

The boxes were placed periodically throughout the field and each of them had a little treasure inside! Some of them had smaller nests like this one and I was expecting them all to be like this but I was certainly wrong lol. I don't know if the biologists or people who help maintain these boxes will remove the nesting material at the end of the winter so that come springtime, the birds will have a nice spot to land and make a nest without feeling like it's someone else's and fly away to try and build it elsewhere.

The more boxes I opened though, the bigger the nests were getting! I don't know if the smaller nests are the newer birds that are less experienced or what but the last box we visited was chock full of stuff and barely had a few inches at the top for the bird to hop in and settle down on some eggs lol. I guess that's fine but I found it funny that the first box was pretty small as far as the nest but it got progressively bigger and bigger as I moved along.

What was good to see though was the feathers sitting inside the boxes like that. It means that there were birds using it, as the nest is obvious, but it also means there were some chicks! The tiny feather you can see up front is clearly a chick feather with the parent feather being in the back. That was a welcome sight to see for sure!

There were a whole lot of these boxes strewn throughout the field. I think by the time we were done we counted 10 of them which was pretty darn cool to see. They were in good shape too so I'm guessing they recently installed them within the last 2 maybe 3 years. I know what I'm going to be doing with the little man one of these days! We are going to build a nesting box like this so that the little fellas can get out of the rain and elements and make some little chicks!