Could someone with knowledge about this subject reply to this query?
Thanks,
John Penhallurick
_____
From: Guttman,Burton
Sent: Tuesday, 6 February 2007 7:07 PM
To: John Murray Penhallurick
Subject: Nesting boxes for Australian birds
John, you're one of the regular Australian contributors to Birdchat, and I'd
be extremely grateful if you could provide some information about Australian
birds. Some friends of mine, Dave and Dee Milne, will be traveling to
Australia in April, primarily to Tasmania, as part of a kind of host-guest
exchange program. Dave is a marine biologist and a birder, and he also
makes bird houses -- that is, nesting boxes for birds -- and he thought it
would be nice to bring along an unassembled bird house as a gift for their
hosts. But he points out that there are no woodpeckers in Australia, and
therefore -- since woodpeckers are the common agents here that open up
nesting sites in hollow trees -- he wonders about the availability of
hollow-tree nesting sites that Australian birds would commonly use. I felt
sure that some kind of Australian bird must have adapted to digging out such
sites, or at the very least that they would be created naturally from limbs
falling off trees and similar kinds of damage to trees. Leafing through
Pizzey's Field Guide to the Birds of Australia, I see a few species whose
nesting sites are described as hollows in trees, though not many. Perhaps
you could comment on the use of hollow trees and nesting boxes in Australia,
and it would also be useful if you could suggest some approximate sizes of
boxes that would be useful, especially on the sizes of the entrance holes,
since holes of different sizes attract some species and exclude others.
Cheers and thanks for your help,
Burt
Burt Guttman
The Evergreen State College
Olympia, WA 98505
Home: 7334 Holmes Island Road S. E., Olympia, 98503
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