Everyone likes to be tucked up snug at night - even garden birds... After discovering that our local birds were taking a of sheep's wool nesting material stuffed into the eaves above our '
Welly boot nest site', we wondered whether we could put it out next to our bird feeders.
The next question was 'Would it matter if it got wet'.. so we decided to setup an experiment. One has the sheep wool under a plant pot, the other is open to the air.
These two have been named 'Hairy Harry' and 'Woolly Willy'. All very scientific-like.
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One of our nest boxes is seeing daily activity with blue tits doing some preliminary nest-building, using a mixture of moss and ?bark slivers. None of the wool is going here, so someone else is obviously taking it...
Update: Find out who -->
Videos in this blog post
In the past we have put out dog hair, and that disappears quite quickly. The blue/great/coal tits use it at the final stage of nest building as a top layer, and keep adding it as each egg is laid.
ReplyDeleteI think long-tail tits, wrens and robins sometimes use it (maybe you need to deploy your trail-cam). It doesn't seem to matter if its been rained on, but I'd be interested in the results of your research. I assume your children are still very much involved. Its a shame they hit 13 eventually!
Have deployed Trail-cam, see more recent post. We even had a (?Queen) bumblebee take an interest, obviously not for the wool!
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