This trail is NOT monitored except in the winter at the end of each year. These wooden boxes were installed at the same time as the Roseland Park boxes. The boxes are either NABS or slot style, mounted on metal poles with no predator guards. The wood on some is deteriorating, and the insides of many were wet due to poor design or cracking roofs. Most are in woods or brambles on the edge of the 9 hole golf course. Mice were expected to be a big challenge here, along with House Wrens. No HOSP have been seen or heard here.
This trail is located across the street from the Roseland Park trail. I do not currently have the time to monitor the golf course trail. In the meantime, I am using it as an informal productivity comparison for the actively monitored Roseland Park trail.
We made forensic guesses on usage in 2007 and 2008 when cleaning out the boxes during the winter. IMO, the four main reasons this trail is so unproductive are:
Mouse/HOWR/Flying squirrel? Acorns and pine needles.
Move this box - on steep hill
25
Flying squirrel (live)
Flying Squirrel, no occupant
HOWR - many pine needles
4
Mouse? Bluebird?
EABL F
Mouse
Mouse
4/26/09: 4 eggs, dropped all eggs on ground while cleaning out mouse part
5/3: 1 egg hatching - see photo
5/11: 1 broken egg, 1 broken partially developed, no baby
5/17: empty (a little mouse/FS? material?
2010: move, wet
When Nature made the bluebird she wished to propitiate both the sky and the earth, so she gave him the color of the one on his back and the hue of the other on his breast, and ordained that his appearance in spring should denote that the strife and war between these two elements was at an end. He is the peace-harbinger; in him the celestial and terrestrial strike hands and are fast friends. He means the furrow and he means the warmth; he means all the soft, wooing influences of the spring on the one hand, and the retreating footsteps of winter on the other.
John Burroughs, The Bluebird, 1867
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