Update on Backyard Bluebirds - 2018

[tclarkwood]

Hello... I wasn't sure when any other topic categories were going to be created so I wanted to give an update on what happened to my second brood of bluebirds here in Central Alabama.  Just before Memorial Day I found my bluebird house had been opened and all of the baby bluebirds have been removed except one and half of the nest was ripped out.  The door was left open.  Some kind of animal or person had been able to get around the baffle and unlatch the door and get my babies.  I pushed the nest back into the house with the one bluebird baby.  The next day. The door was opened again and nothing was left in the bluebird house.  Not even the nest.  So what do you think it was?   I found out  the next week that it was a juvenile raccoon.  The raccoon was eating all my birdseed, dumping out my hummingbird feeders and eating my suet cakes every night until I decided to trap him.   It took me 2 weeks but I finally trapped him in late June.  Another raccoon was also in the area and started doing the same thing.  I trapped it about a week ago.  Now I am raccoon free!  I think!  My bluebird parents, decided to start a new family about a month ago in my hanging chick a dee house so I have brood number 3 about to fledge now.  Brood 3 has 4 babies the best that I can tell.   I'm not sure if they will do a 4th brood but I hope so to make up for the ones the raccoon ate.   Well... That is what happened in my backyard since the forums went up in smoke!   Ha ha!   I can't believe the raccoon got around my baffle.  Still do not know how he did it?  A wild game camera would be a good investment someday.  I would have loved to have captured that footage.