The Beginning

On the Refuge Since this is my first blog I will begin by giving a brief introduction to what my internship actually is. Located in Touisset, Warren, RI sits the Audubon Society Wildlife Refuge; this refuge is home to many animals such as deer, rabbits and many species of bird. The main goal of this internship is to monitor and analyze the breeding habits of one bird in particular, the Eastern Bluebird. What my job entails is monitoring ten different nesting boxes located on the refuge and tracking the nests all the way from the construction to when the chicks fledge and leave the nest. Many hours of my internship goes to my time observing the nests both from afar and up close and also tracking and analyzing all of my data.

When I first started this internship I was under the impression that right away I was going to be seeing the Eastern Bluebird, however this was not the case. So far I feel as though I have seen every bird except the bluebird. I have observed sparrows, finches, swallows, wrens, robins, hawks, turkeys and many more. When I asked the director of the internship which birds were allowed in the nesting boxes, he told me that many native birds such as swallows, wrens, chickadees, and tufted titmouse’s were allowed and to track them the same way I would track a bluebird, but if I was to see a sparrow nest I had to immediately remove it. For the first few weeks on the job I felt as though my only responsibility was to evict the constantly nesting sparrows. In fact so far I have removed about ten nests and a total of seven sparrow eggs. Though this is not my favorite part of the internship, it must be done to limit the breeding of this invasive species and allow more native species to reproduce. But it has not been all doom and gloom on the refuge for out of my ten boxes four are occupied by native species. Two boxes are inhabited by the Tree Swallow. These energetic little birds make their nests from course grasses and feathers and lay anywhere between four to seven eggs. Once hatched the chicks will take about sixteen to twenty-four days to fledge and leave the nest. The other two houses are occupied by the Common House Wren. The little brown birds create large nests out of piled up sticks and usually lay between two and eight eggs. In order to track the different nests I have been maintaining a daily log. This log includes the species, number of eggs, number of hatches, number of successful fledglings and various data. The only birds so far to have produced eggs is the tree swallow pair in box C10. This is actually their second clutch, which leads me to believe a predator (possibly a sparrow) got to their first one. I hope that as I continue to monitor the nests I am able to observe more eggs and possible the successful rearing of chicks