April 19

First Egg of the Season........Sort of

     We are about one month into the season now and things are running about 2-3 weeks behind last year.  Last year at this time 14 boxes already had kestrel eggs in them. So far this year I have not found one single kestrel egg in any of the boxes. I have been into over 40 boxes in the last two days so I have not checked them all (63 total boxes) but so far no kestrel eggs.  I did, however, find my first starling egg (pictured above) in a box today. I usually stay ahead of the starlings and never let things get to this stage, but this box never showed any evidence of starling use so I left it alone. This is a perfect example of why it is so important to periodically go into all boxes to assess what is actually going on. During my latest rounds of box checks I have found 31 boxes with well formed "cups" or depressions in the shavings which is a very good sign. Not all of those will probably end up with eggs, but a very high percentage will.  There are still about 5 or 6 boxes with no cups formed that are historically successful boxes so we'll see how this all shakes out.

     Total number of box checks to date = 507     Total miles traveled so far = 2,087