Installing more bluebird houses

We have lots of bluebirds at Pleasant Valley Conservancy, using either natural cavities or artificial boxes that we have installed.

Saturday Kathie and I volunteered at Madison Audubon's Goose Pond Sanctuary to help finish work on 100 bluebird boxes that another volunteer had made this past winter. We helped installed the hardware needed to mount the boxes on poles. As recompense, Mark Martin gave us 4 boxes to install at Pleasant Valley Conservancy. These join the 8 that we installed about five years ago.

Yesterday (Sunday) Kathie and I installed these new boxes at Pleasant Valley.

Each box is fastened to a hollow metal conduit pipe, which slides over a 1/2" rebar. The rebar is pounded into the ground with a post driver. This arrangement works very well and the houses are quite stable. Our main problem is the bedrock close to the ground surface. We have to probe around to find cracks in the subsurface rocks large enough so that the rebar can be driven in.

The eight old ones have held up very well, and we generally have had at least 4 of them used by bluebirds.

So we now have 12 boxes, each numbered so that we can keep track of nesting success.

Today, we flushed a bluebird out of box #3 as we drove by. They won't be laying eggs for a while, but they should be starting to build their nests soon.