Project NestWatch: Citizens study nature’s small masterpieces

Published 9:28 am Thursday, April 25, 2024

A picture of a nesting tree swallow seen on volunteer Rachel Winslow's smartphone at the Willapa National Wildlife Refuge headquarters in Long Beach.

A bird nest in the backyard. A penchant for observation. A little time and patience. Through Project NestWatch—the current iteration of a decades-old, crowdsourced effort at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to collect data about nesting birds — any combination of these things can be leveraged for the sake of science.

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For information about participating in Project NestWatch, building nest boxes, and monitoring nests, visit www.nestwatch.org.

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To learn about volunteer opportunities at the Willapa National Wildlife Refuge, contact visitor services specialist Hope Presley at hope_presley@fws.gov.

A big idea

Several years ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Dawn Harris found herself with plenty of each. She had taken over as visitor services manager for the Willapa National Wildlife Refuge Complex, and noticed an abundance of nest boxes on refuge grounds. At the time, refuge staff were only checking the boxes at the end of the nesting season to see if they had been used or not, before cleaning them out. But Harris, an OSU-trained wildlife biologist, saw an opportunity, and pitched the idea of participating in Project NestWatch to the refuge’s management team.

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‘We would find out when nests are initiated, how many eggs are laid, how long incubation is occurring, how many chicks hatch and make it through the feeding process, and then how many are fledging.’

Dawn Harris, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

“I wanted to start monitoring them right away to make sure we were contributing to a greater body of science,” she explained. “We would find out when nests are initiated, how many eggs are laid, how long incubation is occurring, how many chicks hatch and make it through the feeding process, and then how many are fledging.”

Using a standardized nest-monitoring protocol and the NestWatch website or app, project participants around the world submit their observations of bird nests to a database maintained by the Lab of Ornithology. According to the project’s 2023 year-end report, 2,672 NestWatchers across the United States and Canada recorded 36,035 nests attempted by 294 distinct bird species. The sheer breadth of this data allows scientists to analyze trends in the reproductive biology of entire bird populations, and to study how those populations may be responding to a multitude of external pressures.

For instance, “some of that [data] might help tell what sort of impact climate change is having on nesting,” Harris said. “Are birds nesting earlier or later? Are they successful or not? Were insect populations high enough that year to sustain them? [The database] tracks lots of information.”

Too few cavities

Locally, one source of pressure on birds that Harris hopes nest boxes can mitigate is “a dearth of cavities out in the wild.” Or in other words, habitat scarcity, which, according to refuge wildlife biologist Will Ritchie, is part of the legacy of intensive forest management.

“Many of the forest lands that we have within the refuge were formally production forests,” he explains. “As a result, a large proportion of the acreage is in the younger and intermediate age class, which is obviously going to have fewer large trees that can support cavities when they either get damaged or die.” Fewer cavity-supporting snags means fewer woodpecker- or rot-created holes, which in turn means fewer suitable nesting sites for secondary cavity-nesters like swallows, chickadees, and nuthatches.

Volunteer monitors

That’s where the nest boxes come in. In 2023, volunteers Rachel Winslow and Sarah Andrews monitored a total of 60 small nest boxes spread throughout the Willapa refuge complex’s various management sites, along with a handful of larger boxes and hanging-gourd systems meant for owls, kestrels, ducks, and purple martins. This year’s swallow box count is up to 69, with 20 more in the works, and Winslow is monitoring them by herself. Between April and September, she visits each box once a week to take pictures, record observations, and check for signs of predation. It’s rewarding work for the former x-ray tech and self-described data aficionado. But it also requires consistency, commitment, and some background knowledge.

“It might seem like enough to just put up boxes and let the birds do the rest of the work, but I think we have a certain responsibility for them,” she reflected.

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‘It might seem like enough to just put up boxes and let the birds do the rest of the work, but I think we have a certain responsibility for them.’

Rachel Winslow, volunteer

That willingness to take responsibility has already led to tangible progress for the refuge. After discovering that last year’s sole Western bluebird nest had been raided by raccoons — the sort of discovery that easily could have been missed without regular monitoring — Harris and Winslow teamed up with the nonprofit Friends of Willapa National Wildlife Refuge to raise funds for over 50 predator guards, which were retrofitted onto nest boxes just three weeks ago. Other times, Winslow flushes out or tosses the eggs of invasive species like European starlings, which compete aggressively with native species for nesting space.

As much time and effort as the refuge’s growing nest box program requires, both Harris and Winslow are quick to emphasize the “citizen” aspect of this citizen science program, and that anybody can contribute any kind or number of nests to the database.

“We hope people will be inspired to put boxes out on their property,” Harris said, while cautioning that any such nest box would need to be actively monitored and protected from predation. But cautious observation of naturally occurring nests is helpful too — for both birds and scientists. And that can probably be done in your backyard.

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