itrom.......Last year when chickadees took over our fave BB box after so many year of having only BBs in the box there were reclaim fights but the BBs did not win and we never saw any all summer and that was sad. That particular box is the one we can see easily and we love to watch them and take photos. There are two other boxes nearby so I kept asking myself why can't the cute chickadees just use those...lol. BBs have moved into the fave box and I hope there is peace! Good luck and enjoy whatever nests ...or...put up another box and if you do make sure you follow instructions as to how far from the fist one.

Linda, I think a hawk would have gotten more than a wing. That sounds like it's possibly a cat attack. Whatever, I'm sorry. We know that the odds of a bluebird fledgling making it for a full year are slim and that's why they nest as often as 3, even 4 times in some areas, a year, but it's always sad witness one who has died. I've found baby dees buried deep in a nest when I cleaned out the box and figured that they were too large for the adults to remove when they died. Two fledged and two were buried. Needless to say I have no idea why two died and two made it.

Well If you have ever seen TRES fledge theres no way a baby Blue will make it. I would almost opt to candle the eggs and if there is little to nothing there get rid of them. Is it possable to tell the difference between babies at hatching time? I would want to put them in the Blues nest but that could cause problems too. Lets think babies not eggs here. No way a blue can survive with a TRES Mom, overloading a Blue or having babies hatch days before her clutch could result in dead babies. Yikes this is one for Bet, Malinda or Cornell. Im still thinkin destroy the eggs so no babies ever suffer.

Hi Pam and anyone else interested, After my last posting, we had a very high wind come up for about an hour. It blew some branches and clumps of leaves down all around our area, but no rain. It also blew down a large piece of wood that may have frightened the baby, but for whatever reason, the little bird went back under the fence to outside of our yard, and the parents seemed to keep him there this time. In fact, he quite moved on from being squenched up next to the fence, and I could not see him any more with a quick check, but I did hear him answering his mother, and the parents kept coming back and were in different trees to watch after him. They were actually in the trees they perched in to watch their original bluebird home, about 10 feet closer to the front of the house than they had been through this ordeal in our fenced back yard. This morning when I got up, the bluebird parents were not there nor was he. The parents did come back a couple of times when I was outside and did not seem distressed. They did not seem to be calling to him at all. I didn't hear them sing or call any at all. The trees they were sitting in as I mentioned before were closer to the front of my yard and I cannot see the birds from my back deck with binoculars like I could when they were looking after him in the shed. I didn't want to stay too close to see and frighten him into running again, so I missed seeing if they were going down and feeding him, if they had encouraged him to fly and if he did, or anything at all. All I know is that by about 10:00 a.m. when I went around to sit on my little concrete bench which is about 15 feet from the bluebird house, the mom and dad sat in the tree there where they always looked after their home like they were communing with me. Lol. I did hear what I know was some kind of baby bird high in the trees in my neighbor's yard right next to this area. Since I have not heard a baby bird calling from that area throughout this weekend, I'm just going to believe that it was him and that he was able to fly and get up there with his parents calling him at some time that I didn't see. He could almost fly the day before, so I'm hoping that they get him moved down the block to the little field where they moved and where his siblings are. I hope they bring all their babies back to see me some day the way another bluebird family did a couple of years ago. I'll try to let you know if I see all 5 of the babies some time, but there are lots of bluebirds around here, so it may be hard to tell. Last week, there was a whole family of about 7 bluebirds on my roof for about 30 minutes. Karen