Marcy Cunkleman’s bird house is seeing a lot of activity now that the new tenants are fully established inside. The tree swallows’ eggs have hatched and the babies are growing fast. On Thursday and Saturday she sent me photo updates.
Above, one of the adults lands at the nest opening last week. There are so many feathers decorating the inside of the box that you can see one nearly poking out of the hole.
At that point the nestlings were still pink and just beginning to grow their own feathers. See the gray bumps on their pink bodies?
Even though they looked pink and helpless they were strong enough to hoist themselves to the nest opening and position their beaks, waiting for their parents to deliver food.
By Saturday they were beginning to look like swallows with glossy dark feathers.
It won’t be long before they fledge.
(photos by Marcy Cunkleman)
I am so happy to see anyone successfully raising bluebirds and tree swallows! i wanted to pass along some information i have been reading: although tree swallows use small nestboxes, their wing feathers do not develop properly in cramped conditions such as this round box mary has provided. the tree swallows will probably return next year, i would encourage mary to invest in a slightly bigger nestbox for next spring. good luck mary!
Thanks Matt, I have other wooden boxes, but this is the only one they like to use…I have had many sucesses for fledging with the Tree Swallows in this box and we thought about making a few other ones out of the pvc pipe….think we will make some a little bigger. Thanks for the suggestion…another thing I noticed, the bigger the “kids” get the more feathers get thrown out…Maybe the feathers help with keeping the blowflies out of the nest, like I find in the nestbox for the Bluebirds.
The photos here are spectacular. I found another blog post that talks about the requirements for a good nest box: http://www.treeswallowprojects.com/boxplace.html