Nest Box Success 2019

In spring this year I was fortunate to spend a few weeks of my usual volunteering days on Thursday's helping Steve Downing open up our nest boxes on the reserve and, where appropriate, ring the chicks. Steve is a licensed ringer and we are fortunate that he is willing to spend time on our reserve doing this valuable work. To be ringed, the chicks have to be fairly close to fledging so the period that they are available for ringing in each nest is quite short and this required multiple visits to each nest box. Even with these we still managed to miss the ringing window for some of the boxes. 

We managed to find a total of 52 nest boxes. The summary of our findings is:

1) We ringed a total of 99 blue tit chicks in 12 nest boxes.

2) We ringed a total of 27 great tit chicks in 5 boxes.

3) 8 further nest boxes successfully fledged blue or great tits.

4) The percentage of nest boxes that were successful was 48%.

5) A further 17% of the nest boxes showed signs of attempted breeding.