Tuesday, July 17, 2012

TurfNet video on Monitoring Bluebird Houses


One of the first and easiest environmental projects that we undertook at The Bear Trace was building blue bird houses and placing them around the golf course. We have a total of 44 Eastern Blue Bird nesting houses scattered throughout the golf course and weekly monitoring of the houses can be a daunting task.  I am very fortunate to have a group of volunteers from The Friends of Harrison Bay State Park group which have been gracious enough for the past three years to take on the task of monitoring the houses.

Diane Johnstone and Angie Medley of The Friends of
Harrison Bay State Park using the electrician's
camera to safely monitor the blue bird houses.
A great tool that we found to assist in monitoring the bird houses is the hand held electrician's camera.  Our boxes are built so the nest is accessible from the side via a swinging door.  This is great when you need to get in and clean out an old nest but we had several instances where eggs or even hatchlings fell out of the nest box when the door was opened to inspect the nest.  Loosing eggs or birds in this manner was completely unacceptable and we had to find a solution.  That solution came one day at our local Grainger store when I saw the hand held electrician's camera behind the counter.

Here is a link to the latest TurfNet video we have done on how to Inspect Bird Houses with Electrician's Camera.