First Martin Nest Change

We did our first nest change of the season today. The chicks in gourd #1 are between 16 and 18 days old; the late one remains developmentally behind but is getting his share of bugs. Today is at the tail end of the allowed window for nest changing.

My approach is to prepare an identical spare gourd ahead of time, then transfer the chicks into it quickly. I then put the new gourd up in place of the original one and can clean the old one at my leisure to use as the next replacment.  In this image, I am stuffing new straw into the replacement gourd.

We found a few mites on the chicks; no blowflies thankfully. Challenge yourself by looking for the mites in the pictures below! The bigger problem the birds face is night-time mosquitoes which we can see swarming in the video feed ... not much we can do about that.