...to want to take a shotgun to Woody bloody Woodpecker?

[RustyBear]

We've set up a nestcam in a box on the school wall & a pair of blue tits laid 13 eggs about 10 days ago. There are magpies & squirrels around so we put a metal protector round the entrance to stop them enlarging the hole to get at the eggs.

But Woody just started to bore a hole through the wood under the hole. The caretaker glued a stronger panel over the top (not wanting to disturb the sitting bird with drilling or screwing) & when the woodpecker started to chisel his way through that, put a metal plate on top. But this morning we found that in a single night he'd gone straight through the box next to the hole & all but three of the eggs are gone.

I know it's actually just as much a nature lesson to see that there are predators around as it is to watch the eggs hatch, but the children will be so upset if he finally gets the three remaining eggs.

So far the mother has stuck to the nest & the children have been fascinated to watch her carefully piling all the bits of wood left strewn about the nest box tidily in one corner.

Does anyone have any ideas how to protect the box without disturbing the mum too much?

Personally I like the idea of one Year 3 boy, who thinks we ought to move the nest box somewhere else and set up a dummy one in its place, complete with mini chocolate eggs inside to fool the woodpecker....

is there a perch on the box? might be worth getting rid of that so the woodpecker has nothing to cling onto?

I found this link rusty. They aren't always trying to get the eggs, it's just that they are driven to excavate any likely source of grubs or nesting space (and drumming to attract mate ect)

So providing a nearby alternative of dead and bug-filled wood could help.

Now, given that ds1 has pulled down the rubber toy eagle that I strung up to deter housemartins from building an ill-sited nest on our freshly painted house, what do I try next?

Thanks for that link Fredworm - if he wasn't originally trying to get at the eggs, he certainly welcomed them as a bonus when ie got in!. And the nestbox is right next door to our wildlife garden, which has piles od dead wood for insect habitats (which of course may have been what attracted him to the area in the first place!)

There isn't a perch, he's just clinging on to the wood.

Our ingenious caretake has now put up a kind of guard consisting of a cut up plastic box, which we hope will be too slippery for him to cling to, and wrapped the nestbox in chicken wire. It looks weird, but who cares if it does the trick!

I'll see if I can get a screen cap from the inside of the nest & post a picture later on - we've got tests in Year 3 at the moment, so the computer with the camera is off.

With your housemartin problem, the RSPB have sihouettes of birds of prey to stop birds flying into windows - would those work?.

oh, yes, rusty. Those silhouettes might work.

It sounds like a great nature area for your schoolchildren. I hope that the caretaker's contraption works.

In previous years we've welcomed the housemartins but they keep flying in through the nearby window and panicking around the house, as well as pooing copiously down the side of the house -- and also the nest often collapses leaving us with lots of ghastly bird babies dead on ground. Apparently you are allowed to deter nesting, though not to take down an existing nest.

Mum on the nest

just 3 eggs left!

You can see the pile of wood splinters at the bottom of the picture - they were originally scattered all over the nest & she spent a lot of time tidying them up yesterday.

Maybe this is an opportunity to teach the children that out there in the wild, animals eat other animals to survive. It's wonderful that you have a successful nest cam, but projecting the image of a big bad woodpecker eating the fluffy ickle blue tits' eggs is the perfect example of how humans' interest in nature will always cause problems. Nature is red in tooth and claw, some baby birds make it, others don't, the woodpecker eats well and survives, stop interfering.

We wouldn't be interfering if it was a nest anywhere else, but if the woodpecker gets through in the camera compartment that beak is going to do a lot of damage - so we're really just protecting the school's equipment! As well as making sure that children next year have an opportunity to observe it too.

The teachers have not missed the opportunity to point out to the children that they eat eggs as well and that the woodpecker isn't really a villain.

Sorry, you hadn't mentioned the damage to the camera before, that was all, just the eggs. Having said that, I didn't take the shooting the woodpecker "threat" seriously, honest!

Well, the camera hasn't been damaged yet, luckily, but we want to make sure it isn't - the hole he made last night was very close to the wire.

I love the way the teachers can incorporate pretty much anything that happens into a lesson - for example one class have been looking in science at pictures a woodpecker's skull to see how it is adapted so it doesn't get brain damage from all that banging.

Still hanging in there - but we still don't know if the remaining eggs are going to hatch.

We now have a live feed online in case anyone's interested.

Here