Songbirds

Whether you’re a backyard birder, avid ornithologist, environmentalist, or just enjoy listening to birdsong over your morning coffee, birds can play an important part in your life.

Most people have seen the typical bird boxes referred to as bluebird boxes, since they were popularized as a strategy to help cavity-nesting bluebirds by increasing the availability of nesting sites. In addition to bluebirds, there are also other cavity-nesting birds, such as house wrens and tree swallows, that are common nesters in these boxes on the Tittabawassee River floodplain.

The American Robin, a songbird of the thrush family, is perhaps the most well-known songbird in the nation, serving as the state bird for Connecticut, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

These four species were selected as passerine (small songbird) receptors of concern for the site-specific, ecological risk assessment of furan and dioxin compounds because of their abundance, ease of study, limited feeding range during nesting, diversity of diet between species, and previous use in the risk assessment framework. To gauge overall population health and sustainability, we assess their breeding success, occupancy, diet, survival, and the concentrations of compounds in specific tissues (eggs, nestlings, and diet).

We have placed approximately 300 nest boxes along the Tittabawassee River from Sanford to the Stroebel Road Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge property and are planning to continue monitoring them through 2009. That said, if you happen to come upon some of our boxes, please enjoy observing the birds from a distance and leave the monitoring of the boxes to us.