Last year we received a generous grant from the Whidbey Island Garden Tour to help us complete a few projects intended to improve the bird life at the elementary school garden. The Whidbey Island Garden Tour is a wonderful local organization whose mission is to provide funding to local causes and nonprofit organizations supporting the improvement, restoration, education and maintenance of our shared Whidbey Island habitat. Every Summer they organize a tour of many of Whidbey Island’s spectacular private gardens. This year’s tour will happen on June 22nd. To learn more, please visit their website at https://www.wigt.org/.
We have three projects that we are using the grant money for. First, we installed a nest box for barn owls, which has yet to be taken by a breeding pair but we remain hopeful for this year and future years.
Our barn owl nest box!
Second, we installed a bird feeder with a motion-activated camera near our willow grove and with easy viewing from our solar barn outdoor classroom. Though we unfortunately won’t be able to embed a livestream page, we have added a link in the primary menu above where we will post our most recent and most interesting bird sightings.
Our new bird feeder/camera!
Here are just a couple images to get you started – click the link above to see more! So far we have had spotted towhee, black-capped chickadee, white-crowned sparrow, house finch and dark-eyed junco visit, but we expect many more!
Dark-eyed junco
Black-capped chickadee
Our last project we are just getting started on, installing a raptor pole! We hope this will allow raptors to visit our farm more frequently and take advantage of our vole population.
Thanks for visiting! -Farmer Brian
South Whidbey School Farms 