Bluebirds: A Tragic Finale

 Time constraints continue to prevent me from doing my normal blogging routines but hopefully by the middle of this week, things will ease up a bit and I can visit my blogging family more than I have been. 

This is the scene that greeted me the very next morning after the last picture taken shown in the previous post. The bird house is supposed to be at the top of the post and the bucket, a.k.a. raccoon deterrent, is supposed to be underneath that. But a fat raccoon had evidently hung on the bottom of the bucket and as you might tell, broke the bucket bottom so that it slid down the post. After that, the raccoon essentially had a step stool to the buffet. With the nesting straw hanging out the the opening, I wasn't optimistic that any birds have survived.

Indeed, when I got closer and looked at the grass shown below, I knew the ending. Although the birdhouse isn't mine, I had a lot emotionally invested in it this spring and this makes the third or fourth time it has been raided before the birds fledged. I decided that this would be the last time. So I did some internet research and came across raccoon baffles which is essentially a steel tube placed over the fence post with a dome top so that there is nothing for the raccoon to grab onto. I have one on order to arrive hopefully the first of next week. I also made a trip to the hardware store to find a different solution for attaching the birdhouse. My neighbor just wired it to the fence post and you can see some of that from the photo above at the top of the nesting box. But it still allows the bird house to slip down with enough pressure. I got a few pipe brackets and hose clamps and hopefully can solve that problem as well.

The bird house itself isn't in the best of shape after a handful of seasons and so I'm going to rehab it a bit. I might build another one later this fall time provided, this time with a hinged top instead of a hinged front. That should allow for easier photography though at the sacrifice of it being a bit harder to clean out. Hopefully I can still get this one back up in time to have another bluebird family adopt it and hatch another brood this year. My neighbor says three or four broods a year aren't uncommon in his other nesting boxes. But the last time a raccoon devastated the nest, it was nearly a couple years before we got this pair of birds. I haven't seen them around all day. I'm guessing they are holed up somewhere nursing their broken hearts.