Post by matt on Apr 23, 2020 17:31:42 GMT
Yep - it clearly doesn't stop them nesting if that is the only option locally. My take away from reading the studies Benn posted and a few other ones as well is that will nest just about anywhere if that is the only option going, but will choose certain boxes over others if there are a few choices available. For example, in one of the papers that Benn linked to they had a large number of deep and shallow nest boxes located near to each other, and the deep boxes got 15 nests and the shallow boxes got zero! Deep was 19cm center of hole to bottom of nest box and shallow was 9cm. I think now that having a large number of boxes in my garden all targeting blue tits does not increase my chances of a nest, and perhaps even decreases it, since the birds are aware of all the boxes and might assume that other birds will nest there/competition etc. Next year I might go with one box targeting bluetits, one GTs, 1xstarling and 1xrobin as well. We will see!