The Memorial Day weekend makes the beginning of the brood rearing stage at my Abingdon VA colony site. My first eggs began hatching on Wednesday or Thursday of this past week. Active nests, those with eggs , climbed from 20 on May 19 to 78 on May 27th. I anticipate more to become active as many other nests have fresh leaves meaning ‘ready for eggs’. It is never a sure thing that these nests will receive eggs but I expect quite a few will. I will do another nest check on Monday and that will give me a better feel to how the numbers will pan out. Even after that I usually get one or two late nests after the first week of June but after twenty five years one thing for certain is that nothing is certain.

A follow up on my extra wide ChirpyNest cavity. This cavity is occupied by an ASY pair. ASY means after second year meaning that these birds are adult martins and have made the migration trip at least twice in their lifetime. Adult martins will usually have larger clutches of eggs and have better success raising young. I really like the extra room of this cavity and I think the young will as well. This nest contains 5 eggs as of Thursday but I will have to do one more check before knowing if five is the egg total since my previous check on May 19th found no eggs. Martins will lay one egg per day until finished and will begin incubation when the second to last egg is laid. It’s fascinating that they know when they will be finished laying.

Now on to the Mystery

Thursday morning as I checked on my birds I was shocked to see this ChirpyNest door hanging atop my T-10 house. Looking around I found that it came from the new rack added this spring. Happily, the pair of young birds occupying the house were sitting in a doorless ChirpyNest. It didn’t take long to figure that an owl must have paid a visit and somehow pulled the door off but how the heck did it end up here. After retrieving the door by putting a screw in the end of a ten foot piece of PVC to make a hook, I found blood on the underside of the porch. The owl must have hit the house in an attack, and got its talon caught between the porch and the perch. As it flew off the door was pulled of the house and it somehow removed it while perched atop the T-10. Fortunately it didn’t fly off into the great expanse and drop the door somewhere never to be found. I’ve witnessed owls attacking and I can see this as a plausible explanation. No other signs such as owl feathers were found and have not been found all season so I cannot know for sure. I believe the birds were in the cavity and the whole premise of ChirpyNest is that martins will tuck deep in the cavity in such an event. When I saw these two perched in the open house I was relieved and reassured that ChirpyNest protected them. I have no way of knowing if the attack occurred in the AM before dawn, or during the night. Hopefully this owl will steer clear of the site due to what had to be a perplexing event for it.

Nest checks and observation will be important going forward to monitor whether There are other visits. Since my colony was devastated by owl predation form 2010 to 2015, I’ve built back up and I attribute the success to the ChirpyNest design. Resident owls are still around but their devastation on my site have ended and my numbers have increased to their highest totals of the 25 years i’ve managed my site.

Below are photos of this mysterious event.