The End of an Era?

As many of you will know, I have been running a Pied Flycatcher nest box study near Llananno in Wales for a number of years. It actually started in early 1993 when Gary, Mick T, a few other ex-members and I knocked together about 60 boxes and took them to Wales to find some suitable trees and receptive land owners. We doubled the number of boxes the following year and they have all been monitored each summer since (except 2001 because of foot & mouth disease). Each spring we also went on a maintenance visit to get the boxes ready for the coming season. Twenty-five years ago it was a challenge to put up all the boxes and carry sacks of boxes around on the maintenance visits. Since then it seems there has either been some tectonic plate activity that has pushed the hills steeper or as I head further into my 60s my mind is fitter than my body – I would like to think it is the former but I really know it is the latter! Also operating the site from about 130 miles away always held a few challenges, not least correctly timing the visit to ring the chicks, but it got increasingly difficult to get a team together for the ringing visits never mind the maintenance visits. Taking all into account I have decided to call it a day and have located a ringer who lives about 10 miles from the boxes to take over for the 2019 season and beyond.

I enjoyed running the project; I think I must have travelled well over 15,000 miles just going to the boxes but feel it was well worth it. The woods the boxes were in had virtually no trees with natural holes so to create this new active nesting area for a red-listed species gave a great deal of satisfaction. Unfortunately the efforts have not stopped the decline of the Pied Flycatcher as the graph of occupancy rates shows but I think we did our bit to help.

The graph show occupancy rates of the boxes in each year (except 2001). A box was considered ‘occupied’ by Pied Flycatchers if it had got to at least the egg stage, it does not mean the box successfully fledged chicks. We ringed over 5000 Pied Flycatchers but many went unringed if we got our visit timing out so I guess probably over 7000 birds fledged from the boxes during the time we were running the project.

Apart from the data submitted to the BTO, data was also used by the University of Wales and is now being used by Bob Harris who has been asked by the Welsh Ornithological Society to prepare a paper on the current status of the Pied Flycatcher in Wales.

I would like to thank all the people that have helped over the years in visiting and box making and I hope the new custodian will see the birds thrive.

Kev