Forty-five nesting structures make up my conservation project at Alum Creek. Some nestboxes are made of wood; some are made of compressed recycled plastic, and most are nestjars made from four-inch PVC drainpipe with roofs fashioned from plastic fencing. However, I will refer to all as nestboxes, and each nestbox is attached to a five-feet-long sleeve made from 1-1/4″ PVC water pipe. All nestboxes and sleeves are stored in my basement in between nesting seasons.
On April 12, 2014, I transferred nestboxes from my basement to their locations in the northern most reaches of Alum Creek Lake parallel to Hogback Road south of Kilbourne. For six hours, I used a kayak paddle to guide my canoe to each nestbox’s pipe mount that stands in the lake all year, and there, I slid each sleeve over its pipe and tightened a hose clamp that threads through two slots near the sleeve’s lower edge to hold the nest chamber above known flood levels.
After arriving weeks earlier, Tree Swallows were excited to see their former homes reappear. I always find the birds’ excitement to be contagious as they land on their nestboxes, sometimes directly above my head. On this first trip out, no warblers were seen, but none were expected.
I returned to the project more than a month later on May 18 for my first monitoring visit to record 23 active nests with eggs: warblers had three nests with eggs; I found House Wren eggs in one nestbox, and Tree Swallows had laid eggs in nineteen nests. All species were on schedule with swallows nesting in boxes with 1-3/8″ entrances, whereas warblers and wrens claimed boxes with smaller 1-1/8″ entrances. I pair boxes with two different entrance hole sizes so Tree Swallows can chase egg-piercing wrens out of their neighborhoods to allow warblers to safely nest just yards away. For the most part, the management plan works. Ten monitoring trips followed my May 18 outing, including four trips launched in order to band warbler nestlings.
During the season, Prothonotary Warblers attempted eight nests with eggs and seven nests (87.5%) successfully fledged a total of 28 nestlings, all wearing U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service leg bands. The lone nest failure was the work of House Wrens.
Warblers laid 36 eggs. Three nests held six eggs each, four eggs were recorded in four clutches, and one clutch held two eggs. I suspect that the two-egg-nest probably held more eggs initially, but without evidence, I will refrain from speculation. Twenty-nine (84.6%) of the 36 warbler eggs hatched after 12 days of incubation, and 28 (76.9%) of the original eggs matured to fledge. After only 11 – 12 days as nestlings, 90.9% of nestlings flew from their nests. Prothonotary nests held eggs or nestlings during a 70-day period from May 13 through July 21.
Tree Swallows attempted 22 nests with eggs and 21 (95.5%) nests fledged young. Swallows laid 118 eggs, 105 (89.0%) hatched, and 88 (74.6%) fledged. Using the same numbers, 83.8% of the hatchlings matured to fledge. The swallow nesting season lasted 89 days between May 2 and July 29.
House Wrens attempted 11 nests and all were successful. Seven of the 11 nests appeared after Tree Swallows had left the neighborhood after raising their own graceful families. Wrens laid 66 eggs, 61 (92.4%) hatched, and all hatchlings grew to fledge to explain why I like to call House Wrens “super bird.” Typically, wrens had the longest season of 92 days between the first egg on May 15 through the last fledging on August 15.
An Ill-fated Prothonotary Warbler Family
Since golden swamp warblers are having a challenging time existing, I feel compelled to band them so I and other conservationists and researchers can stand a better chance to learn more about them. On the other hand, I am aging, and the effort to keep the project going demands more canoe launches in order to record data and to accurately predict the best times to band the warblers with their safety in mind. Nonetheless, banding results are spurring me on.
On July 14, I got a request for my banding data from the Bird Banding Lab after one of my banded warblers had been found and reported to the lab. By the end of the day, I had submitted the needed banding data to the lab. Since the banding lab processes thousands of band records, it took 12 days before I received an official email from the lab with the finder’s information.
In the meantime, on July 20, as I was traveling on Hogback Road to launch my canoe to retrieve 20 nestboxes from the lake for winter storage, I spotted a freshly killed prothonotary on the road. I slammed on my brakes and quickly retrieved the unlucky warbler to find a band on its leg. It was a sibling of the other unlucky warbler whose band information was being processed at the lab.
On July 26, I received an email with my official “Report to Bander” form. Gene Jumper found warbler xxxx-xxx64 (X’s are substitutes for numbers) 1.6 miles from where it was raised. The warbler had five siblings in nestbox 36 along the western shore of Alum Creek Lake south of Osprey platform AC-4. The unlucky bird had collided with a window at the Jumper residence. Gene Jumper, a retired dentist, had received his “Certificate of Appreciation” from the banding lab with information detailing the bird’s banding location, when it was banded and other information.\
Contacting Gene Jumper was made easy with information I received from the lab and I visited Gene and his wife to experience a good conversation and a better understanding of a warbler that lived only 42 days after hatching, and 30 days after fledging. Its sibling, xxxx-xxx61 that collided with a vehicle on Hogback Road, died 0.93 mile from where it was raised, based on measurements from a map. My find had lived 48 days after hatching.
Rewards generated from conservation projects have two origins: birds and people. Interactions with birds and other creatures in nature are always fun or thought provoking. Other rewards come from the people that you meet through your hobby. I look forward to banding Prothonotary Warblers in 2015 and beyond, and when I visited with Gene Jumper, he was planning to frame his “Certificate of Appreciation” from the banding lab. Like bluebirds, Prothonotary Warblers are colorful ambassadors of conservation.
Since I maintain salvage permits from the Ohio Division of Wildlife and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the two Prothonotary Warblers described above will continue to inspire and educate once they are processed into study skins by student curators at the Ohio Wesleyan Zoology Museum. Knowing that the unlucky birds will be preserved for posterity helps me accept the fact that they died so young.