As Thanksgiving rolls in I have been busy updating some pages on the website. Doesn’t take long for things to get outdated. I am also making some sense of all the data collected regarding the temperature inside ChirpyNest, compared to troyer gourds and Super gourds. The simple conclusion is the Plastic gourds are hot. Even with vent ports plastic gourds build heat early in the day and remain several degree over the air temperature, especially with the sun shining. ChirpyNest temperatures keep within a degree of the air temperature . How much does this affect the young and the martins themselves? I think it has a big effect.
One of the things I did this past season was to eliminate plastic gourds and replace them with ChirpyNest. I did this in part to monitor Jumpers at my site. In 2019 I had zero young to jump, sometimes referred to as premature fledging. I was super nice to inspect my colony every time and not find baby birds on the ground. I of course look forward to future years to see if this continues.
Another thing I noticed was that I was able to inspect nests up to the day the young fledged. I did not intend to study this but as I was doing checks on poles with brood of varying ages I just continued checks of all brood without any problem of the young fledging early. This will be something I intentionally look at next season.
Keep checking back as I will be adding to the site in coming weeks, especially posting the data from the temperature study. In the meantime Here are some Spot check temperatures from 2019.
These readings from October 2 at 6:48 pm. October was a hot month.
These readings are from July 15 at 12:46 PM. Horizontal = troyer horizontal. Vert = Supergourd. CN1 and CN2 are chirpyNest houses and air = outside temperature.