It’s still bitter cold on a morning here in Yorkshire and today was the day for RSPB’s Great British Bird Watch, not ideal for sitting still and counting birds outdoors. The bird watch is their annual event where members spend an hour on a pre prearranged day counting and listing the birds that visit their garden. We decided to do our counting from the patio doors of our bedroom with the help of a telephoto lens fitted to the camera on a tripod giving us some distance from the bird feeders. We spent a lovely first hour of our day doing this with our morning coffee.
With that job out of the way I set about putting up some bird nesting boxes around Smithy Brook. I’d managed to get hold of 10 nesting boxes with a mix of tit, wren and robin openings. They were put together from recycled timber and only cost me around £3.00 each.
We get a great mix of bird life in Smithy Brook with our feeders constantly visited by blue tits, great tits, coal tits and long tailed tits along with several cheeky robins and the odd shy little wren so putting up bird boxes with these in mind seems like a great idea.
We’re not short of trees in Smithy Brook so I had no trouble finding good locations for them. Ideally nesting boxes should face North East ‘ish. This avoids driving wind and rain entering the box and also prevents overheating in the height of summer. Both cold and heat will kill a nest of chicks rapidly.
The tit boxes should be positioned between two and four metres from the ground. The robin and wren boxes lower at between one and two metres. The robin and wren boxes are also much more likely to be used if the are hidden from open view by shrubbery.
I’m hoping that the boxes get some use this summer although it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the are ignored for the first year until they start to weather a little and begin to blend into their surrounding a bit more.
Next job is to get myself some owl boxes as we get lots of night time owl visitors and providing them with somewhere to nest would be fantastic.
