Top Photo: Eastern bluebird eggs.

The last nest with birds has emptied, all the birds have fledged. It’s late in the season and though we’ve gone into August in years past, that nest would have had to have been underway by now in order to make it through the rest of the season.

So we’re calling it quits and tallying up the numbers.

Twelve birds fledged this season, 9 bluebirds and 3 chickadees. Of those, 4 bluebirds fledged from the Parking Deck East (PKE) box and 5 from Parking Deck West (PKW) box. Only 3 chickadees made it through the season, all from the Explore the Wild nest box.The season started out good with nest construction beginning in March. By mid April four bluebird nests were either complete or nearly so at Sailboat Pond, Into the Mist, Parking Deck East (PKE), and Parking Deck West (PKW).

The nests at Sailboat Pond and Into the Mist switched back and forth between chickadees and bluebirds a couple of times but finally settled on chickadees in both boxes.

Unfortunately both nests were destroyed by house wrens during the final week of April. According to the evidence (dead and missing nestlings and eggs) house wrens destroyed any remaining eggs in the nests and killed nestlings, removing at least two of them from the nest boxes. I’ve seen rival birds’ eggs tossed out of nests by house wrens, but never nestlings. This was a first for me.

Though making a grand and successful job of killing the season for a couple of nests of chickadees, there was a feeble attempt at nesting by house wrens at the Cow Pasture. They started, but never finished building a nest.

There was a successful chickadee nest at Explore the Wild (ETW) which was able to fledge 3 birds. Four bluebirds fledged from PKE and 5 from PKW.

In the years where data was collected, this year (2025) was one of the worst seasons since 2012 for the total number of birds fledged. Only one year (2021) had fewer birds, another tied this year (2019).

In the end, any season where birds are added to the local population is a good one. There are twelve more birds flying around the museum’s airspace than there were a few months ago.

See you next year.

Ranger Greg