Bluebird houses get a spring cleaning

YAKIMA — Ah, the trials of the landlord.

Fly-by-night inhabitants.

Single-family domiciles converted — by the tenants — to multifamily.

Late, or nonexistent, rent payments.

But, ah, the rewards.

Watching a resident feather his nest. Or helping a young family launch toward success.

For the Yakima Valley Audubon Society, landlording is mostly all delights.

And when the joys come, they're ample — gorgeous wisps of sapphire, bobbing and dipping on the horizon.

Audubon members have been tending houses for bluebirds for the past 23 years, helping parent more than 9,000 fledglings.

"It is our longest ongoing project, and one of our best," says Richard Repp, who heads bluebird monitoring for the group.

Recently, a dozen Auduboners gathered for their annual spring cleaning along the 13-mile Vredenburgh Bluebird Trail, between the Wenas Valley and Ellensburg, Klickitat County.

In 1982, Virginia and Harold Vredenburgh built and installed the first 58 houses, designed to attract bluebirds, to fence posts along North Wenas Road.

Several decades ago the U.S. bluebird population had dropped because logging and removal of tree snags had reduced habitat.

However, the native songbird adapted easily to more luxurious housing, wooden structures built with small entrance holes to keep out starlings and other aggressive birds.

Through the years, Audubon members have increased their real-estate holdings to 132 houses, augmenting the local bluebird population, they say.

Bluebirds prefer a clean slate, which has a solid biological reason: mites and other contaminants wouldn't be conducive to raising babies. So in comes the Audubon cleaning crew, reaching into each house, pulling out old grass and dirt, and spiffing up the property.

The Vredenburgh Trail begins at about the 2,000-foot elevation mark, in Ponderosa pine territory (favored by the western bluebird with its cobalt jacket and rusty breast), meandering up some 500 feet into open steppe, inhabited by the paler, but still striking, mountain bluebird.

Repp, who heads the group, says some males already have arrived to stake out territory before females return from wintering in more temperate climes. Nesting won't be far behind.

Last year, the first eggs were found in early April; from there it's a two-week wait before the young hatch. On average, about two-thirds of the eggs laid in houses on the Vredenburgh Trail fledge into viable birds.

Two to three weeks after hatching, fledglings will take wing and leave the nests.

By then Auduboners will be in the throes of weekly nest monitoring, counting eggs, numbers that hatch and how many fledglings successfully leave the nest.

Bluebird couples can hatch as many as three broods during the summer. They're remarkably loyal to their region, returning to approximately the same house or area along the road each spring.