Friday, October 2, 2015

Bluebirds and Tree Swallows

I picked Belladonna up at Grand Valley State University.  She was working out so I had a half hour to kill.

This is the Grand Valley storm water management plan.  A large berm (maybe 35 feet high) separate the parking lot on the right side of the image from the ponds.
View from the top of the berm looking west.
I was curious about all of those little white specks.
Bird houses, on 15 meter by 25 meter grid.
I wondered how many were out there.

Fifty?
One hundred?  Maybe even more?
I admire the brute force approach.  The amount of effort is impressive. I suspect they were looking at bluebird nesting choices relative to proximity to water and other nesting pairs, utilization of boxes by other species and fledgling success rate.  I would love to read that thesis.

This photo shows vegetation kill by a contact herbicide, probably glyphosate.  I don't know if this is normal maintenance or if this is one of the parameters being investigated.
Most of the flat is tall grass prairie restoration.  This photo shows New England Aster (blue and pink), Blanket flower and Golden Rod.
This feral crabapple tree caught my eye due to the profusion of berries and their bright, translucent redness. 
A slightly closer view of the crabapple branch.  This keyed out as Malus toringo aka, Malus sieboldii.

Posted by at

3 comments:

  1. Old NFOOctober 2, 2015 at 10:02 PM

    Huh, interesting... And I wonder what if any thesis came out of those boxes and the mix of flowers, fruits, and water.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Eaton Rapids JoeOctober 2, 2015 at 10:24 PM

      I had to tune up my Google-fu, but this is what I found: http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1229&context=honorsprojects

      It turns out that the study was focused on Tree Swallows and the study ran from 1992 until 2006.

      After skimming the thesis, I now have a new "favorite" bird. The Parus major.

      The other interesting factoid is that the Grand Valley logo looks much like the Glock "spring" logo. I wonder if Glock is the official firearm sponser for GVSu?

      Delete
  2. Old NFOOctober 2, 2015 at 10:02 PM

    Huh, interesting... And I wonder what if any thesis came out of those boxes and the mix of flowers, fruits, and water.

    ReplyDelete

Readers who are willing to comment make this a better blog. Civil dialog is a valuable thing.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)