OPERATION TREE SPARROW – update

Thanks to the magnificent team effort by everyone concerned, we now have 35 nest boxes up in the Cockersands area. All have a reference number and have been allocated to the sponsors who will be notified with this newsletter.

A preliminary check of the boxes has revealed that Blue Tits occupy Brian Hugo’s box (B2) and Elizabeth Holcroft’s box (A8) already.  Within 5 minutes of putting up box A3 (Pete Fletcher’s) a Blue Tit was inspecting the hole. Within 60 seconds of putting up box A6 (Jill Blackburn’s) a Great Tit and then a Blue Tit inspected the hole, and no sooner had Bill Cross stepped off the ladder after putting up box A9 (Gwen Dix’s) a Blue Tit was peering into the hole.  Meanwhile, Tree Sparrows flew overhead and landed in a nearby hedge to watch the proceedings from a distance.

We have a variety of nest box designs and ways of opening the boxes to test the skills of Paul Cammack, who has kindly volunteered to ring any nestlings. We are also going to fill in nest record cards and compare our findings with those of Bob Danson’s on the Fylde.

Some of our nestbox makers have donated their time and materials free of charge which is extremely generous of them.  The young nestbox-makers in the Fylde YOC group, though, could not be expected to do the same so the £51.50 raised from sponsorship went to them and we got a nice letter from their Assistant Group Leader which I would like to reproduce at this point:

The response to the nestbox scheme has been so good that we have a nice stockpile of boxes for future use, either as replacement boxes or to extend the scheme if it is successful.

My thanks once again to everyone involved. All we have to do now is watch this space…………………….

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