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The First and Last Time I Saw The Bluebirds
I saw a male Eastern Bluebird in my yard last week, five days before what would’ve been my daughter Ana’s 21st birthday. I thought it was a sign from her.
The bluebird was perched in our Catalpa Tree, above the bluebird box that we’d installed several years ago. Until then, I’d never seen a single bluebird investigate the box and I’d only ever seen one or two pass through my yard.
That’s because, as it turns out, I don’t have the ideal habitat for bluebirds. I have a quintessential (if overgrown) suburban yard with some open space and several “lesser” spaces crowded with brush, trees, and structures.
Bluebirds like open fields and grasslands with trees close enough to perch on, but not too tightly clustered together. They nest in cavities — hollowed out trees, fence posts, stumps — that sort of thing. They can’t create their own cavities, so they look for ones that already exist.
There’s been a loss of bluebird habitat over the past century and bluebird boxes have helped mitigate this. This loss, along with the introduction of non-native invasive species of birds (namely, House Sparrows and Starlings) exacerbated a decline in the bluebird population. The invasive birds also nest in enclosed cavities, and tend to be more aggressive than bluebirds.
