I took advantage of the comfortable weather today to clean and do maintenance on my nest boxes at the Hoover Nature Preserve. Saturday Darrell Gange joined me in Areas M and N, and today I worked the boxes at Mudhen Marsh. As of now 90 nest boxes have been cleaned and only 160 to go. Hopefully the weather will stay as nice until all the nest boxes have been cleaned and given new screws and exterior coating.

Heavy rain June 21st through June 25th flooded much of the area, downing many trees and damaging or destroying some nest boxes. I expected to find unhatched eggs or dead hatchlings in nest boxes as the timing of the flooding was very close to the fledgling dates for the Prothonotary Warblers. I was pleasantly surprised to find little evidence of nest failure in the areas serviced thus far. No little cadavers and only two unhatched eggs. It looks like the bullet missed by mere days. At the lower east shore of Hoover some inlets were heavily flooded and at our last monitoring trip there was an absence of singing males. Those areas were all natural cavities and closer to the water than the nest boxes. Those areas likely took a very bad hit from the floods.

Today as I serviced the nest boxes at Mudhen Marsh I kept an eye out for bird activity. Mudflats have been exposed, although they are not significant, and I observed a small number of shorebirds and egrets working the edges. Shorebirds included a multitude of Killdeer and a few Greater Yellowlegs, Lesser Yellowlegs, Semipalmated Plover, Spotted Sandpiper and a single Western Sandpiper. Great Egrets seem to be everywhere at the northern end of Hoover Reservoir. A single Bald Eagle and Osprey were flying overhead. Lots of Gray Catbirds, but few warblers. Just one here and one there with a cooperative Wilson's Warbler topping the list.

At the boardwalk in Area M at Galena, mudflats are emerging off the end of the boardwalk. A small variety of peeps were on the high mound close to the Osprey platform. Lots of Killdeer, a few Semipalmated Plovers and single Greater Yellowlegs, Lesser Yellowlegs and a Western Sandpiper. Hopefully the mudflats will develop before the shorebirds are all past Ohio.

Charlie Bombaci

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