News & Muse from the Bluebird Trail

By Shayne Mitchell

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 wrens
were 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.


For more birding news, click here to access the entire Bluebird News and Muse blog.


Fall 2025

Volume 43 , Number 3

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