Many people at the College are excited about new housing units that were installed on campus this spring, but it’s safe to say that students would find them a little too small.
That’s because the housing in question is 60 nestboxes for tree swallows and other cavity-nesting birds that were built and strategically placed around Mayflower Hill by Anna Forsman, assistant professor of biology; Matthew TenEyck, the grounds supervisor and landscape manager; other Colby employees; and members of the new student organization, Colby Birds.
Plenty of feathered tenants already have settled into and are raising their families in the nestboxes. Although the birds don’t know it, they are the first participants in a new outdoor lab on campus, one where Forsman and her students have a front-row seat to study them.
“Driving around campus and seeing the birds checking out the boxes and using the boxes, it’s really fun,” the professor said. “When you put up nestboxes, you just never know how well it’s going to work. I’m definitely very, very pleased.”
Forsman has studied cavity nesting birds for more than 20 years. These birds include tree swallows, purple martins, bluebirds, and chickadees, all of which raise their young in natural or artificial cavities.
She wants to learn more about how birds interact with potentially pathogenic or dangerous things in the environment, such as bacteria, viruses, parasites like worms, ectoparasites like mites, fleas, and lice, and even toxins.
“I’m really interested in understanding how the immune system develops and functions in the wild,” she said. “Birds are my primary study system.”
Forsman came to Colby two years ago from the University of Central Florida, where she established and ran the school’s Purple Martin Project, a long-term monitoring program for the species. She wanted to continue working with nestbox species in Maine, because she needed a large sample size of birds for her ecoimmunology research.
Spending a lot of time searching for nests wasn’t practical. But building and installing nestboxes was.
“I wanted to start an on-campus field site to provide research opportunities to students without the limitation of transportation,” she said. “If we put out nestboxes and know the locations of those nestboxes, it’s very efficient for monitoring tree swallows, which is our primary focus here.”
She and her students take measurements of nestlings, band them, and collect blood and fecal samples to find out what they are eating through DNA analysis.
TenEyck and his crew were instrumental in making the dream of nestboxes on campus become a reality. He was also new to Colby, and reached out to Forsman last winter to tell her about his previous experience with establishing nestbox trails at golf courses in the Portland area. Was it something she’d be interested in doing at Colby?
“Basically, the stars aligned,” she said. “There’s no way I could have made this happen so quickly and to this scale without the help of Matthew.”
TenEyck led a team that constructed the boxes according to a design used by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and this spring they installed them around campus. This fall, the plan is to build and install another 60 nest boxes.
“Next spring, I’m aiming for a full field season here on campus,” Forsman said.
The project took place at a time when a passion for ornithology is growing at Colby. Last year, Forsman installed new tree swallow nestboxes on Allen Island, and with her students also started an official chapter of the National Audubon Society, called Colby Birds.
