North Park Bluebird Program

While exploring North Park, you are likely to notice a plentitude of little boxes mounted on poles and installed in fields. These boxes are part of the North Park Bluebird Program, an ongoing citizen science project that aims to provide safe nesting places to the Eastern Bluebird and help increase their populations in Northern Allegheny County!

The Eastern Bluebird is a cavity-nesting bird, meaning it requires natural holes to raise its young. Typically, these cavities would be found in hollow trees. However, with increasing human development, nesting locations for Eastern Bluebirds are few and far between. In addition, the increasing rate of pesticide use has led to less food for the bluebird. These factors combined mean that Eastern Bluebirds, alongside other cavity-nesting and insect-eating birds, are experiencing population decline.

In order to take part in the national effort to grow Eastern Bluebird populations, Latodami Nature Center launched the North Park Bluebird Program in 2019. This program was kickstarted when Latodami Nature Center staff member Ken Knapp noticed that existing bluebird boxes in North Park had fallen into disrepair and were not being monitored for use by bluebirds and other cavity-nesting species. This gave Ken the idea to create a program to locate, replace, and monitor bluebird boxes throughout North Park.

In the spring of 2019, 15 volunteers were recruited to map the locations of the existing boxes and clean them out.  Once a database was created, it was used it to determine what boxes needed repaired or removed.  More importantly, it laid out a strategy to expand the bluebird box territories into areas that could support bluebird populations as well as start a monitoring program.

Each season since then, the North Park Bluebird Project has expanded, adding new boxes in new territories, recruiting more volunteers, and reporting more successful fledgling of Eastern Bluebirds and other cavity-nesting species. Today, Latodami Nature Center is happy to report that there are 396 boxes in North Park and the surrounding municipal parks with 92 volunteers in charge of weekly monitoring. Since 2024, nearly 1,800 bluebirds and over 4,000 total birds have fledged from the boxes, and we cannot wait to see those numbers grow as this program continues. A special thank you to Ken Knapp, the North Park Bluebird Box coordinator.