On Tuesday, October 8, Peter Ward, Terry Carr and I spent more than 3 hours trudging through swamp and blackberry bushes in Boundary Bay Regional Park (BBRP) to check our Delta Nats Nesting boxes. Fortunately, it was a beautiful morning/afternoon. I updated our Nestbox Chart (see attached BBRP-Nestbox-Chart- Oct 2013) with the results of our examination of most of our 30 boxes in the park. Terry took lots of photos which can be seen on our Picasa site at: https://picasaweb.google.com/DNCBirding.
The photos are included with Terry’s North Forty Park Barn Owl box installation shots, because we did this installation in the morning before coming to BBRP.
Our nesting boxes were not successful this year, we think mainly because of the baffles we installed to make the holes smaller. We were trying to exclude House Sparrows, which was successful, but Tree Swallows did not use the boxes, except one unsuccessfully. So we removed the baffles returning to standard hole size for Tree Swallows (1×2 oval or 1 ¼ round). We plugged the holes with Styrofoam which we will remove when the Swallows arrive in Spring. Hopefully this will exclude undesirable species from using the boxes and encourage Tree Swallows to check in and enter. Over the Winter, we (who?) will remove other baffles and plug the boxes that we did not plug on Tuesday, including the six boxes we did not visit. Comments encouraged.
Tom Bearss, President, Delta Naturalists’ Society
Delta Naturalists Society 
Leave a comment