All nest monitoring is conducted in accordance with The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Nestwatch Nest Monitoring Manual. All monitoring data is entered into the Nestwatch database, and an end-of-year summary is submitted to the New York State Bluebird Society. If you’d like to follow along with our Bluebird Trail Map, please click here.
Nest box monitoring began during March and ended in August after our final batch of fledglings took off on the 31st. The 2025 breeding totals for Eastern bluebirds and northern house wrenswere significantly lower than 2024, while tree swallows were only slightly lower. There are likely several causes responsible for this decline: there was a significant winterkill of bluebirds this past year; May was very wet; some nest boxes were moved further away from brushy areas in an attempt to favor more nesting bluebirds and swallows, and discourage wrens; and it appears that a higher rate of interspecies competition and predation increased the number of nest failures. Even with all these issues, we still had lots of nesting success on the trail ...just not as much as the previous year. One happy decline in 2025 was the number of mice using our nest boxes.
At the beginning of this year, we relocated twelve nest boxes (six locations) in an effort to favor bluebirds and swallows vs wrens. (Note that the population of wrens significantly exceeds the combined populations of bluebirds and swallows.) This appears to have worked as each of these new locations hosted bluebirds and/or tree swallows while wren nesting was reduced when compared to the old locations. We also put up four new boxes in prime bluebird/swallow territory at the beginning of the Waterfall Trail that were also successful. Nonetheless, these positive outcomes for bluebirds and swallows were not enough to overcome the other factors that resulted in an overall nesting decline in our boxes.
All nest boxes have received an end of season cleaning. They will be checked again before the 2026 breeding season to see if repairs are needed and to evict any mice.
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