Bluebird Trail

Bluebirds are an endangered spices.  To help protect them, “bluebird trails” have been set up in parks or rec. center grounds.  A bluebird trail is not a set trail, but a series of nest boxes set up for the birds.  My mom is a monitor for the Bluebird trail at Burk Lake Park near where we live.  For the past two years, I helped her.  Every week a monitor goes to each box.  We open them up and see what’s there and record everything.  This is a sample of how we would record the data.

Date	Species	Partial nest	Complete Nest	Eggs	Young	Age	Fledglings	Notes	Initials
3/20	BB	X	x	4				Mother  in area	MD

                  

Bluebirds are not the only birds that use the boxes.  Chickadees, Tree Swallows, House Sparrows, and House Wrens all use them.  The only bird out of those we do not want to use the boxes are the house sparrows.  If we find a house sparrow nest, we take it out, even if it has eggs in it.  If the eggs have hatched, we have to leave it.  House sparrows are an invasive species.  They compete with the other birds for food, territory, and nesting sites.  It is not uncommon for a tree sparrow to go into the nest box and smash the eggs of another bird.  I found one of those once.  A box had a bluebird nest in it and the two eggs that were there were pecked apart.

The Burk Lake trail is several miles long and took 3 hours to do.  It had several sections.  There was one section on either side of the golf course, with two boxes in the middle that we had to skip if it was a busy day.  The third part was along a dam at the lake.  The lake was a favorite spot for the tree swallows.  The lake and the meadow had plenty of insects and nesting materials.  Unfortunately, those boxes were also favorites for wasps.  At the tail end of the nesting season, the birds would be moving on and the wasps moved in.  We had to use a stick to knock out any nests and soap the areas where they might hang another one.

                   The second year I helped my mom, the Rec. Center near us set up a trail.  It only has about 10 boxes, so it didn’t take as long to check.  The boxes are checked every week, but there are several volunteers.  My mom and me checked each trail once a month, sometimes twice depending on how the rotations fell.  They are checked from March through August.

	Abbreviation	Nest type	Egg color
Bluebird	BB	Round, made of grasses	Pale blue
Tree Swallow	TS	Rectangular or square base, with a cup in the center. Uses feathers, large feather dome over eggs common.	White
House Sparrow	HS	Ugly, uses trash, grasses, feathers, anything.  Unorganized, not neat.	White with brown speckles
Carolina Chickadee	CC	Uses grasses and mostly moss	Very light brown to almost white with brown speckles
House Wren	HW	Stick nest	Light brown with darker brown speckles

Fostering Cats

My family fostered cats for about 4 years.  When I say “my family”, I really mean I did.  We fostered cats for a group called Riverside Rescue. They take in strays and some cats that would be put down at a shelter that doesn’t have a no-kill policy.  The cats always stayed in my room.  I had to make sure they were fed and keep the litter box clean.  I liked having cats in my room.  They had to stay in my room because we have a dog and we already had one cat.  We fostered a pair of twins, Isis and Bastet, and our cat Shadow got attached to them, so we adopted them.  We kept fostering cats after that, but we agreed that we wouldn’t adopt any more, three was enough.

My favorite cat that we fostered was a litter of kittens and their mom.  The mother had lost all but one of her kittens, and the three little black ones had lost their mother.  The mother adopted the three black ones to replace the ones she lost.  We had to help her by bottle feeding them, it was so cool.  We named the one orange kitten Nala.  The other three were Port, Starboard and Sir Edmund.  Sir Edmund was named after Sir Edmund Hilary, because he climbed EVERY THING!  You would walk in with or without the bottle and he’d try to claw his way up your leg.  Brush him off and sit down and he’d be at it again.  He climbed my shelves and anything else he could.

            We soon found that I have a special way with cats.  They would give me the shy ones that would hide from everyone.  I would just sit in my room and read a book or something and they would slowly get used to me.  After a while, they would stop hiding every time someone else came into the room.  I liked working with these cats.  The ones I remember the most are Cally, a pretty calico, Mrs. Kitty, a misty grey-and-white cat, and I have no idea how to spell the other one’s name because my dad named her and its Chinese, she was a cute little Siamese kitten.  Cally was absolutely terrified of everyone.  After a few weeks with me though, even she was able to get adopted out to a normal home.

            The adoptions were over the weekend, so we dropped them off on Saturday mornings and picked them up Sunday nights or afternoons.  We helped a lot with the bake sales the group did too.  Every so often they would have a bake sale in front of the Petsmart where they had the cats.  We would make chocolate cupcakes.  We frosted them with white frosting and put chocolate chips on them upside down to look like paw prints.  We would be there for hours or my mom would just drop me off and I would be there manning the booth.