Thursday, July 05, 2012

Chickadee House Update

You may recall back in April I reported on a new chickadee house I built and put up in one of the apple trees in our back yard. It was hard to tell if the chickadees were actually nesting in it this time. One day we'd see mama and papa going back and forth to the nest, sometimes carrying nesting materials. Other times, it seemed we wouldn't see them for days.

I wasn't absolutely sure they used the box until yesterday morning. I put a ladder up and tapped on the box first. If you hear peeps that means the chicks are still inside. No peeps, so I opened up the box and found this nest.

They seem to have used some kind of animal fur for the top layer. The bottom seems to be made from wood shavings, or maybe shredded palm tree leaves. Pretty neat, huh? Now that the box is cleaned out, they'll hopefully come back to nest in it again next year.

4 Comments:

At 1:24 PM, Blogger Kym said...

That is pretty neat. Who knew that chickadee's would use palm tree leaves in Humboldt?

 
At 4:22 PM, Blogger Fred Mangels said...

To be clear, I'm not sure they are from palm trees, although we have numerous ones in the neighborhood. That's just what they look like to me. Either that, or wood shavings.

 
At 10:27 PM, Blogger Rose said...

Our huskie shed in clumps, and the birds grabbed it up. I always figured they had the warmest nests in the county.

 
At 6:24 AM, Blogger Fred Mangels said...

I haven't seen it in some time but I used to see birds diving on cats in the springtime. They'd pull out a clump of hair as the cat was walking through the yard and take it to make a nest.

 

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