Become a Nest Box Volunteer

We have a fantastic volunteering opportunity here at the reserve for interested people to get involved and become an active member of our fabulous volunteer team.

We have a dedicated welcome day on Tuesday 30^th May to bring new people on board, everyone is welcome.

Our nest box volunteers help to build, position, monitor and record the variety of species that use the numerous nesting boxes across the reserve. We have a range of small nest boxes in the woodland that are particularly for small birds such as tits and robins but that is just the start. You may have noticed the larger boxes for tawny owls and barn owls on the reserve, but we also have specialised boxes for treecreepers within the woodland and tern boxes on the islands in the south marshes for our visiting common terns.

Treecreeper nest box

And it’s not just nesting boxes for the birds we also have a range of bat boxes and in recent years have established a stoat monitoring scheme that relies on boxes being visited by stoats.

Bat box

Stoat Box Survey

The remit of the volunteering team is to keep the reserve and other Yorkshire Water wildlife sites supplied with suitable numbers of nest boxes. These are made in our workshop on site, often to specific dimensions according to the species. The team then sites the boxes on the reserve, wherever there is a need for them and from then onwards the team is responsible for checking, cleaning, maintaining and most importantly monitoring the use of these boxes.

Nest Box Team Survey

The records that the nest box team collect are then shared with a range of organisations. The BTO (British Trust for Ornithology) organise the nationwide nest box scheme, to which we send Tophill Low data. Similarly, any records of bats using the bat boxes are sent to East Yorkshire Bat Group. Volunteers may choose to join the bat group when they monitor and survey the bats. Projects, such as the study on stoats, helped to map the population size on the reserve of this mustelid, helping contribute to data collected from only a handful of other sites in the UK. This project is something that could be developed further in the future. Any new members of the team would be supported to enhance our nest box provision if it fitted into the reserve management plan and could continue to collect important data, either for the reserve or for national surveys.

Stoat Box Survey

We are entering a new phase with our nest box team, and we want this group of volunteers to lead on this dynamic aspect of our volunteering team.

Please come along on Tuesday 30^th May from 10.30am to meet the site team and hopefully join our volunteers.