A Different Kind of Back-to-School Story

  • Chrisula Stone stands beside her wall-mounted poster smiling
    A Different Kind of Back-to-School Story

    Chrisula Stone’s blog post about her journey from NestWatch volunteer to researcher is a must-read!

  • A map of the US and Canada showing blue pins that represent thousands of nest locations
    A Major Milestone

    We’ve begun the long-awaited process of uploading our nest-record card data into the NestWatch database.

  • a snake curled up on top of a nest in a nest box
    A New Way to Deter Snakes

    Recent research describes the success of a new guard that protects tree-mounted nest boxes.

  • A Pulley System for Large Nest Boxes

    For anyone struggling with how to clean and maintain a large nest box mounted on a tall pole, consider installing a pulley system to raise and lower your nest box. Within this post is a link to a design for building a low-cost pulley system.

  • illustration of a bluebird that is not allowing a chickadee to nest in a paired box with a large entrance hole juxtaposed against another illustration where the bluebird is not competing for the second nest box, this time with a smaller entrance hole.
    A Tale of Two Boxes: When Pairing Doesn’t Promote Peace

    Can pairing nest boxes to reduce competition have a downside? Researchers at Davidson College say yes, and that if you’d like to help out the smaller bird species in your area, it’s all about entrance hole size.

  • a carolina wren perched on a flat surface with a harvestman spider in its beak.
    Along Came a Spider

    Spiders can be shriek-inducing for some people; however, birds benefit from these eight-legged creatures in many ways including as a food source, using their webs for nesting material, and adding spider eggs to the nest for pest control.

  • an adult Tree Swallow in its feather-lined nest, along with recently hatched young
    Amazing Arkansas Effort

    This month we uploaded 706 nest records from the Bella Vista Bluebird Society in Arkansas.

  • Two American Dipper nestlings beg for food from within a streamside nest
    American Dippers in Colorado

    Our latest blog post explores the community action taken for these birds after the Gold King Mine spill in 2015.

  • a male bluebird flies towards the entrance of a nest box with an insect in its beak
    Another Data Boost

    We recently uploaded 2,053 nest records, thanks to the South Carolina Bluebird Society.