Ken Schroeder, Dolly Owen, Jay Galvin and Barbara Petersen, members of Rainier Audubon’s Nest Box Committee, met at Emerald Downs last week to clean out the sixteen swallow nest boxes along the south fence. Old boxes in poor condition had been removed in 2020, cleaned and refurbished by Ken Schroeder and Linda Carlson, and reinstalled in January of 2021.Committee members were pleased to discover that fifteen of the sixteen Tree Swallow nest boxes were used last spring/summer. The nests all contained feathers of various duck species, perhaps collected by the swallows from nearby fields on the M Street properties. Three of the nests had abandoned clutches of eggs in them. Were these from a second or third clutch laid too late in the season? Were the parents forced to leave on migration before they hatched? (Would parent birds leave a clutch of eggs in order to migrate?) Did the eggs get too hot last summer? Did human disturbance cause the abandonment? 

The nest boxes are now clean and ready for the arrival of Tree Swallows this coming spring. Please contact info@rainieraudubon.org or a Nest Box Committee member if you’d like to help us with future nest box projects. Currently, Ken Schroeder (kenneth.schroeder@rainieraudubon.org) is building new boxes for installation at Soos Creek Botanical Gardens before they open on March 2, 2022.