Rocky Mountain News
By Mary Taylor Young, Special to the News
August 14, 2014
The bluebirds have flown.
That’s what we discovered this month when we checked our trail of bluebird nest boxes in Las Animas County, west of Trinidad.
We have 10 boxes positioned at the edge of a series of meadows. By April, western bluebirds were paired up and searching for nest sites. By Memorial Day, one box held newly hatched babies: naked, featherless “pinkies” with stubs for wings, bright yellow beaks and enormous, dark, unopened eyes visible through their transparent skin. Five other boxes held clutches of four or five eggs. Most of the eggs were sky blue, but one set was white with brown streaks.
The blue eggs belonged to our most common tenants: western bluebirds. Bluebirds spend winter in southeastern Colorado, so it is a short commute to their summer nesting grounds. Some bluebirds remain in the area for the winter, though I don’t know if these are the same birds that nest here. Bluebirds incubate their eggs for about 14 days, then brood the young for 21 days.
The white and brown eggs belonged to ash-throated flycatchers. They raise one brood a year: this year a nest of four young.
By the end of the summer, 2014 had turned out to be the most successful nesting season since we put up our first boxes in 2000. All 10 of the boxes had nests. We had second broods of bluebirds in two of the boxes. Violet-green swallows, which begin nest-building quite a bit later than bluebirds, took over two other nest boxes after the bluebirds had fledged their young. Between them, the two boxes held seven baby swallows.
We can’t take credit for all these baby birds. We’re just glad to be helpful landlords, and privileged observers.
