I hope you had a good one, wherever you are. I spent the morning of mine at Five Rivers, revisiting Instructor training. It was fun to get back into that again.
Today it involved a presentation on citizen science, which at Five Rivers is mainly focused on counting birds and bats and frogs and butterflies, and keeping track of when they first appear each year and so forth. There is data going back many years (decades in the case of birds) which all makes for a useful record when studying climate change, for example. In the case of bats, our area is "Ground Zero" for white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that is devastating most of the bat population across several states. Good news is, recent counts at Five Rivers suggest that local bat numbers are recovering slightly, though there is still a long way to go.
We also did a tour of some of the bluebird boxes on the site. They become homes to several different birds apart from bluebirds, chiefly tree swallows, wrens and house sparrows. Wrens have an interesting way of going about nesting. The male makes lots of nests out of twigs, here and there in holes and scrubby bushes, and his female picks the one she likes best then sees to the soft furnishings.
House sparrows are an invasive species (from England, oh dear) that have contributed to the bluebird's decline by pinching all the best holes and filling them with their rubbishy nests. Literally - they make their nests out of rubbish. They are not the most welcome of the 224 species of bird that have been sighted at Five Rivers. That's a lot of species - no wonder the place is popular with bird-spotters.
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