eNews June 2025

Carpenter Bees in Boxes?

Have you ever experienced mysterious, almost perfectly circular holes appearing in your nest boxes? If so, you might have other winged creatures trying to lay eggs in your nest box—carpenter bees! These native pollinators bore into wood to lay their eggs, which can occasionally damage nest boxes. In this month’s blog post, we’ll explore carpenter bee identification and habits, plus share some tips to prevent and repair the damage.

New App Features: Groups & Filtering

With our latest update, we are happy to announce the following new features:

• Now you can create and manage nest groups to keep your nest list organized. Any nest groups you have created on the website will sync to your device.
• Your nest list can now be filtered by nest group and by status.
• Users with large datasets will see a faster sync process due to some improvements to the way data are synced to the app from our servers.

Thank you NestWatchers for all the feedback!

New NestWatch Chapter!

We welcome the Suburban Biodiversity Conservation Center at Pace University, out of Pleasantville, NY! Find a Chapter near you.

Bulk Uploads for June

We uploaded 3 datasets this month, adding a total of 1,227 nest records to the NestWatch database. Thanks to Vince Petrillo, Nature Barrie, and Pattie Reum for sending in their data!

NestWatch Tip of the Month

It’s that time of year in the northern hemisphere when temperatures start to climb, and many people grow concerned about how high temperatures may be impacting nesting birds. Check out our Tips for High Heat, and please also take care of your own health while checking nests during a heat wave.

Submission of the Month

Alejandro Williams Viveros submitted this nest of Spectacled Parrotlets in Colombia. Very little has been documented about their nesting biology, so we were excited to see this record with photographs (a first for the species in NestWatch). Want a chance to be featured? Be sure to submit photos with your nest visit data!