Stave Valley Salmonid Enhancement Society's good friend Kiyoshi Takahashi has returned from volunteering his engineering skills on a project in Thailand but has been in poor health since his return. The normally active Kiyoshi, who would think nothing of hiking 5 km now has difficulty walking for 15 minutes. However, Kiyoshi informs us that he is beating the asthma and stomach problems. As a matter of fact he is working to build up his strength so that he can return to Thailand and finish up his engineering project.
All of us at SVSES are pulling for Kiyoshi's full recovery. He is important not only to people and the environment in a wide variety of places. To help illustrate this point I have included some of SVSES's pictures of Kiyoshi as well as a Tri-Cities Newspaper article and a brief note sent along to help us out.A Message from Kiyoshi
Notes About Bird Nest Boxes
It’s good to hear that the swallow boxes in both Silverdale and Stave River sites were active last spring, and in fact I too visited these sites 3 times myself to check it out in year of 2008. Due to very cool spring in the south, and poor weather locally in 2008, activities of migratory birds to breed in north were record low within my experience in the last 15 years, and according to an official record, the poor activities were almost record low in the last many decades. PUMA nesting was especially disappointingly low, although activities of swallows were not as bad as PUMA.
We (the Burke Mountain Naturalists) are planning to do cleaning of nearly 500 nest boxes in our locations around Tri-cites, during February this year. Under a normal condition, I would suggest plan in clean boxes in February for Tree Swallows and
Violet-green Swallows, as they start arriving from south in late Feb. to March. Purple martins arrive a month (adults) or two (sub-adults) later than other swallows, and boxes can be cleaned in March at the latest. We suggest cleaning boxes after cold and wet winter, to avoid further wetting of the nesting beds inside boxes just in case boxes have some leakage of rainwater. Many of recent bird boxes have resistance to rainwater and cleaning can be done earlier if so desired. Bedding materials for TRSW and VGSW can be cut, dry grass or more conveniently wood shavings. However, PUMA prefers only few pieces of relatively long (3-4”) cut, dry grass leaves or stems.
When we clean boxes, we always knock entrances
before removing old nests to make sure to let out squirrels or other animals just in case they use boxes for their winter roosting. Often we find Flying Squirrel inside the swallow boxes. During cleaning boxes, we occasionally find boxes filled almost to its entrance hole with moss and deciduous tree leaves, which indicate boxes were used by one of squirrels or mouse. They usually roost by crawling down into moss. When we see the sign of them, we normally leave it without clean out for them to return, on a condition that there are enough vacant boxes available in the site for birds.
One of the photos in the Mission Stream website showed duck feathers in a nest. This is very common when they need more bedding materials.
Violet-green Swallow seems to prefer to it although they more prefer holes of trees. The feather can be either ducks’ or any other birds that show in the photo, in some cases their own.
Why shape of swallow boxes and PUMA (though it is the largest kind of swallows) are different? TRSW and VGSW boxes are most commonly on land where four legged small animals such as Grey squirrels, Norway rats, or Raccoons may climb up to the box and take eggs or nestlings in the boxes for their meals, or make it their own nests. To avoid them from entering, the entrance hole should be at least 5 inches from the bottom and also avoid overloading of bedding materials.
On the contrary to this, PUMA boxes are commonly
horizontal shape of minimum of 8” deep from entrance to end panel. They are commonly installed on or by the water, where normally the four-legged animals are not common, but most serious predators are gulls and eagles. Horizontally deep shape is to avoid these predators to reach to inside easily. Also, the rectangular shape of entrance is designed to avoid European starlings to overtake the nest before PUMA’s arrival in late spring. Both birds are similar in size but EUST are somewhat larger belly, and not easily enter this 1 3/16” high entrance opening, based on the study conducted by PUMA Conservation Assoc. I too witnessed some EUST tried to enter and eventually gave up.
PUMA boxes are now installed in several Fraser Valley locations, such as Nicomen Slough, Eagle Spot on Harrison River, and Chehalis Lake along with Stave
River and Silverdale Creek Wetland sites. Now we have about a dozen PUMA sites in all over lower mainland. It may take some time for PUMA to notice these inland nesting sites, the first nesting of pairs in both Stave River and Nicomen sites in 2006 and 2007 were very encouraging.
At last, but not least, I wish to congratulate your effort to enhance salmon habitats.
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