Students, neighbors, and birds throughout Lynn and Saugus are all benefitting from a new initiative that provides nesting spaces for feathered residents.
The Nesting Box Initiative launched last spring in a collaborative effort between Wheelabrator waste management and Saugus and Lynn Public Schools. The program provides an opportunity for students to experience project-based learning while building natural habitats for bird species that feed on nuisance and potentially harmful insects.
Geoff Wilson, of Northeast Wetlands restoration which manages the 370-acre Bear Creek Wildlife Sanctuary at Wheelabrator, is leading the efforts on the initiative, according to the Saugus company’s newsletter.
“The idea came from past practices of trying to teach grade schoolers about environmental services, after mutually working with Saugus’s project-based learning program,” said Wilson. “We are teaching kids about the environmental services that can control nuisance insects in a couple of different ways.”
The program works with students in both communities and adjusts the lessons to their grade levels. Kindergarteners, third-graders, fifth-graders, eighth-graders, and Advanced Placement (AP) high school science students are learning how to utilize the environmental services available in their communities. The grade school lessons stick to learning about how the birds help their environment, while the older students are challenged to solve real-world issues within a variety of environmental circumstances.
“This program gives students an opportunity for project-based, interactive learning,” said Superintendent of Lynn Schools Patrick Tutwiler. “We’re pleased that our students have the chance to participate in this important environmental project.”
The nesting boxes were built by woodshop students at Lynn Vocational Technical High School, with the help of their carpentry teacher Ken Beaudet, and Saugus residents taking woodwork at the Senior Center with their instructor Carmine Moschella. The boxes are mounted on a six-foot pole equipped with a small opening on the front for the birds to enter, according to the newsletter.
Wilson said the handcrafted nesting habitats act as substitutes for the natural cavities that tend to be lacking in urban environments. When trees die, they can become a health or danger hazard, so they are quickly removed before these larger cavities can develop. Before a property owner tags a dead tree and calls for it to be removed, woodpeckers come along and make their own nesting cavity, which other species use as their own over time.
“Swallows take care of aerial insects including mosquitoes, wrens get rid of spiders and ticks that hide in the shrubs, and when it comes to black legged ticks that tend to carry Lyme disease, or rodents like the white-footed deer mouse, there are three species of owls that get rid of them,” said Wilson. “So many species provide us with insect and rodent control and they don’t have these nesting sites available to them.”
Erik Hellmer, the AP Environmental teacher at Lynn English High School, said the program is important because it teaches kids they can make a difference by working with their surrounding communities. He said he was enthralled that his students learned the importance of organisms and the impact they have on the human quality of life.
“Being able to improve just the nesting sites of a few bird species can help control an insect population that the students otherwise wouldn’t think about,” he said.
