The 2025 Nesting Season was a success! The team continued to monitor the 8 current nest boxes on the Columbus State Delaware campus. Several students actively engaged with the nest boxes in 2025. In an ENGL 2367 class, students were taken outside to learn about nature journaling and to discuss nest monitoring and data collection. This year, the team also had a student volunteer to help monitor the nest boxes.
The first egg of the year was a bluebird egg laid on April 13th. Our first hatch happened on May 4th, and our last fledgling to leave a nest box was an Eastern Bluebird on August 6th. We had 7 successful Tree Swallow nests and 5 successful Eastern Bluebird nests. Our Eastern Bluebirds had a 100% success rate, meaning that 5 out of 5 nesting attempts resulted in fledglings leaving the nest boxes.
This year, the team also initiated two related projects—a small pollinator garden and a Nature Kits and Observation Station project funded through a CSCC Foundation Mini Grant. The pollinator project is a partnership with Pollinator Pathways and Ohio Pollinator Habitat Initiative. The pollinator garden further enhances the educational value of the campus green space and surrounding habitat. The Nature Kits and Observation Station will be available for student use in the Delaware campus Library and will create an opportunity and a physical space for students to observe, identify, research, and discover the nature that surrounds the campus. Several upcoming activities are planned to coincide with the Observation Station and the goals of the Bluebird Conservation Project.
Between the 2024 and 2025 nesting seasons, our team implemented an interactive display table, The Observation Station, in the Learning Center in Moeller Hall. The Observation Station serves as a hub for informational materials on native Ohio species and the Bluebird Conservation project. Students can visit the Observation Station for information about Eastern Bluebirds and Tree Swallows, to look through a spotting scope, and to see updated data from nestbox monitoring.
