What a beautiful day at Hammonasset to do a nest check. Some of the landlords were able to join us and get a close up view of the nests and the eggs. I also began labelling the outside of the units with first names so if you come to visit, with binoculars, you should be able to find yours. Unfortunately that recording the number of eggs in the book, labelling and egg checking meant we kept the houses down a little longer than we really like to. We don't like to keep mom off the eggs very long, luckily today was a nice warm day.
Many of you received photos of your nests and or eggs. Because we have had such high losses, it is obvious we will not have the numbers of nests we anticipated for this year...I want all of the landlords to be successful and experience all the pleasures of watching the eggs hatch and the birds fledge, so I would like to re-assign some obviously empty compartments to ones that have eggs, but no landlords.
So...some of you will be getting new unit numbers.
Currently we have 25 nests at Hammonasset with 88 eggs at the Chase Pond colony. We have 64 eggs at the Nature Center colony so our colony is holding its own. We expect some more eggs in the next week or so, but that will be the totals for this year.
We are speaking to the Nature Center about presenting a program on purple martins in the next few weeks, I'll keep you posted in case you are interested in coming to it.