How to Attract African Migratory Birds to your Woodland

Hi my name is Richard Lloyd-Evans. I run a project here in South Wales called Project S-Box and today I'd like to talk to you about two of our migrant species called Red Star and Pied Flycatcher. The Pied Flycatcher is a little black and white bird, slightly smaller than a house sparrow and it loves broadleaf woodlands of oak and beech. The Pied Flycatcher migrates from central Africa. It flies up through Africa, some over the Sahara Desert, over into Spain, up into France and up into the UK. The western fringes of the UK are best suited for the Pied Flycatcher because they do like upland areas. So we're talking the moors on the woodlands, the moors on Devon and Cornwall, Mid Wales, Beckham Beacons, Branagh by Llanfairnog, National Park and then we've got the Lake District further up. Pied Flycatchers return to Wales in particular as good stronghold because of the ancient beech and oak trees that we've got here. So I always look for beech and oak to try and place my nest boxes. So I've got a nest box project here in Branagh by Llanfairnog, Beckham Beacons National Park and I actually monitor about a thousand nest boxes, tip boxes like this on the tree here. Obviously we monitor them during the breeding season and at the end of the breeding season we actually take the chicks out of the nest box and put little tiny rings around them, identification numbers and that's a good way of keeping an eye on the species. So a standard tip box, the dimensions you can actually find on the British Trestle Horn Authority or the Royal Society of the Section of Birds, there's plenty of plans on there for them and you can actually use a 28mm hole for Pied Flycatchers and Red Stats but all mine are 32mm hole. I do it 32mm hole because that caters for all small hole nesting birds up to a lesser spotted woodpecker. Placing them, the general rule of thumb again is to get the entrance hole in an easterly direction so all the elements in the summer and spring time is on the other side of the tree and it protects it more but in a woodlands like this you can pretty much point it in any direction because they're protective of these big natural beech trees. So over 10 years my project has grown quite well and I've got a team of volunteers that help me monitor the boxes and what I actually do, I actually number all my nest boxes and it's an easier way of monitoring and I carry my little booklet around with me and I make notes with regards to what's inside the nest box during the breezy season up until when the chicks are ringed. There is a nest box monitoring system that the British Cheshire Wildlife Authority run and we actually send the data off to the British Cheshire Wildlife Authority. We're very careful how we approach the nest boxes because we don't want to startle any species that are inside. I mean no doubt most of the nest boxes are taken over by Great Tit, Blue Tit and Nuttatch, they're three main culprits but I'm very careful with each species and all we do we approach it slowly, lift it gently, look inside, take all the information you can get and walk away from the nest box. The benefits of putting nest boxes in trees obviously is to basically provide more safe homes for these birds returning back from Africa. So the Red Stat is a migrant bird like the Pipeline Catcher, they come from mid-Africa, like an equatorial range of Africa and Wales is a good stronghold for the Red Stat mainly due to nest box projects that we've got on the go and obviously mature woodlands of oak and beech trees that we've still got. It's a striking bird, a male Red Stat returns and females return at the same time usually in April and then they start nesting in early May. So a Red Stat is quite an underrated bird I feel, it's almost as exciting as having a bullfinch in your garden seeing a Red Stat, it's got a lovely lovely red chest, a lovely red tail, this is the male, a silver head with black around as well. This breeding season I've actually designed a different box to try out for the Red Stats and I've not had much success in normal tip boxes with Red Stats and I thought I'd design something different. So this is an open fronted box but it's got a quite a sloping roof that protects the entrance and I've also got a catch on it so it stops grey squirrels from pushing up the lid and it's narrow enough to avoid crows and magpies and that type of thing. I can still access it to be able to ring the chicks and obviously clean the nest at the end of the year and this would be fitted to probably an oak or a beech tree, probably about head height. Red Stats favour unnatural tracks and stone walls and trees like that so I thought that's what I would try, a slightly open fronted box but protected from birds of prey as well. If you're going to try and erect nest boxes in your woodlands and there's various different materials you can use, you can use natural wood from sawmills or you can use ply from builders merchants. Because my nest boxes are at a higher elevation where the weather is quite brutal during the winter and in the spring, I always make mine out of three quarter inch thickness ply. It's a thicker grade and a good external grade ply. I also coat the ply with masonry paint and I put three coats of masonry paint on this which should suffice. I always put felt rooms on my nest boxes but even if the felt roof breaks down, which it does quite often up here because you've got grey squirrels attacking it and biting and chewing this, this would still remain waterproof because the ply I use for the roofing material is a waterproof external grade ply plus I've got a hinge inside to stop the water from getting down the back of the nest box. The hinge that I use for my nest boxes is basically brick layers damp course. I put a strip on the front, sorry on the top and there's also a strip inside as well which you can just about make out. That does two things, it stops the water from going down the back of the nest box and it also stops the felt from splitting. I also put felt on the back of my nest boxes up against the tree to keep the water from entering the back of the nest box. So this season, breeding season, I made six in this particular design and I've had two robins nesting and three redstats nesting in them so it's been a huge success. When I'm monitoring my nest boxes the pie flycatcher and redstat nests are very very similar. They use dried grass and leaves and a bit of moss but the redstat will always have feathers in its nest and the pie flycatcher doesn't. The pie flycatcher eggs are slightly paler, they're a pale blue and the red redstat eggs are like a turquoise bluey colour. So for species like pie flycatcher and redstat returning from Africa, they really do rely on the insects that are provided in these fields and so avoid using pesticides and insecticides if you can. So it's good to maintain the woodlands, maybe lightly graze, let foliage grow underneath. They use dried leaves for their nesting material so if it's a woodland full of dried leaves all the better. There's no really general rule of thumb to erect nest boxes, you can pretty much erect them any time of the year but if you really really want to attract them, get them up in January, February at the latest or even earlier if you can and ready for the likes of blue tits, great tits and nuthatches which will take to them first. If you really want to attract redstats and pie flycatchers then you need to erect as many as possibly can because bearing in mind they're migrant birds a lot of the nest boxes will be taken up by blue tits and great tits and nuthatches so there needs to be spare boxes for the migrant birds also. I've been doing this project now for 25 years and I've been making nest boxes since I was six years old and I still get excited every time I open a nest box to find a pie flycatcher or a redstat nest inside.