Our Garden, the demonstration garden of the Bay Area News Group and the Contra Costa Master Gardeners, has a solid reputation of welcoming visitors, but now volunteers are hoping to attract permanent residents.
The Garden has become part of the California Bluebird Recovery Program with the installation of six nesting boxes. Recent sightings of bluebirds flitting around the Garden led to a conversation with Bob Brittain, one of the more active volunteers with the recovery program.
When Brittain visited the site he spotted several bluebirds in the area. The nesting boxes will provide them with winter shelter as well as a place to nest, lay eggs and introduce a new generation of bluebirds into the world this coming spring.
The Western bluebird has been pushed out of its traditional nesting areas development, pushing them into urbanized area where the competition with other birds has made it difficult on the bluebirds.
The birds have plenty of food and water, Brittain says, but nesting places are hard to come by, which is what spurred the grass roots program.
The bluebirds are cavity nesters, but they lack the physical tools to create their own. Instead, they seek out hollows in trees and abandoned woodpecker nests.
The boxes will be monitored weekly starting in March, and the number of birds, eggs and fledglings will be counted and reported to the program.
The nesting boxes join the Garden’s barn owl box and bee blocks as intergral parts of the Garden. The owl box was put up a couple of months ago and volunteers are hoping it will attract a nesting pair in December or January. The bluebird nesting boxes could be occupied starting in March.
The birds and bees will be active participants in the Garden, with a barn owl helping to keep the rodent population at bay, and the bluebirds, insect-eaters, helping to control pests. Native bees help to pollinate the Garden.
Classes at the Garden have ended for the year, but will resume in April. Our Garden is at Wiget Lane and Shadelands Drive in Walnut Creek. Produce grown year round is donated to the Monument Crisis Center in Concord to help feed the hungry.
Interested in becoming a nesting box monitor or contributing to the cause? Contact the California Bluebird Recovery Program, 22284 N. De Anza Circle, Cupertino 95014.
Follow Joan Morris at Twitter.com/AskJoanMorris.
