Tree swallows bounce back in Cocagne area with strong breeding season
CBC
Louis-Émile Cormier got quite a shock in the late summer of 2021 when he volunteered to help the Pays de Cocagne Sustainable Development Group clean out tree swallow nesting boxes in the Dieppe-Shediac area.
The retired arena worker is pretty fond of the aerial acrobats and has built hundreds of these boxes to give the birds a place to nest.
He tends to more than 200 nesting boxes in the Cocagne watershed.
While inland boxes near Dieppe showed lots of signs of successful nesting, a number of the boxes closer to the coast contained dead young birds.
When Cormier checked his own boxes, he found dead young in 67 of them.
He told CBC News at the time that it was like losing a friend.
"I was kind of destroyed last year," Cormier recalled in a phone interview this week.
"I said to myself, "Is it worth building more birdhouses?"
But when Cormier saw the latest results from this past summer checking on 230 boxes, his disappointment turned to elation.
"We only had one now that there was four young dead in it," he said.
Cormier said there were nests in 130 of his boxes, which he calls a very good percentage.
Unlike their cousin species of barn swallows and bank swallows, which are listed as endangered in this part of the country, tree swallow populations have been pretty healthy.
So Cormier was quite surprised by what had occurred in 2021. He only saw evidence of a 30 per cent success rate in the boxes last year.
Cormier said it looked as if most of the birds were almost ready to begin flying at the time of their death.
This First Person column is the experience of Shannon Flaman, who lives in Red Deer, Alta. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.
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