National Nest Box Week

This week is National Nest Box Week, so we put up two new boxes in the garden this morning. Bug Mad Girl decided to paint one of them first.

Then we registered all of our bird boxes with the BTO's Nest Box Challenge. You record your bird boxes, then monitor whether they are used during the spring/summer. You can take part here www.bto.org/volunteer-surveys/nbc.

To give the nesting birds a little bit of extra help we made some nesting bundles. We collected some twigs, dried grass, reeds, moss, feathers, hair, wool and even some felt and mixed them all together.

A lovely mixture of nesting materials

Then we tied it all onto branches using wool and hung the bundles up in the garden. Hopefully the birds will pull out the nesting material that they want and use it to make their nests. With purple felt and bright blue feathers, we could have some very pretty nests this year!

Full instructions for making nesting bundles can be found on the BBC Wildlife website http://www.discoverwildlife.com/british-wildlife/your-garden/how-make-nesting-bundle.



One of our new nest boxes, with a nesting
bundle hung underneath it

One of our nesting bundles

One of our robins was straight over to see what we'd been doing. It's not her sort of nest box, but maybe she'll use some of the nesting material.

 

Finally, as an extra treat we made some bird cake - all the birds love that!

Lucky birds ... let's hope we have lots of babies again this year!