CAMARILLO : Wooden Homes Built for Nesting Swallows

Tree swallows whose Ventura County nesting sites have been lost to agriculture or development have found help from a pair of Ventura Audubon Society members who are building and mounting wooden houses for the birds.

Jan Wasserman of Camarillo adopted the bird house project seven years ago and enlisted retired Navy engineer Virgil Ketner to help with the woodworking. Together, the two have mounted 50 swallow boxes atop predator-proof plastic poles at the Saticoy Settling Ponds, owned by United Water Conservation District. They have another 150 houses for a variety of birds at the Taft Ranch in the Ojai Valley.

“It brought swallows back to the county,” said Wasserman, a former insurance claims adjuster who now works full-time on protecting and monitoring the birds. “They’re such beautiful birds.”

The migratory swallows, which winter in Central America, nest in hallowed knots in dead or rotting trees from California to Canada. But with the destruction of much of the older stands of trees in the county, tree swallows have been forced to find homes elsewhere in recent years, said Cat Brown, biologist with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Wasserman’s love for birds began eight years ago when her husband, Harold, called her into the back yard to watch as a wild blue jay plucked a peanut from her husband’s hand.

“He regrets that to this day because it changed my life,” she said.

Soon afterward, she quit her job and became a birder full-time. Her husband and his income-tax business, along with assistance from the Audubon Society, support her program. They pay for colored bands to mark the birds so that Wasserman can tell if the same animals return each year.

And they do, she said.

“They return not only to the same area, but to the same house,” she said.

Ketner said he got involved with the project when he and Wasserman were birding together at the settling ponds three years ago and noticed swallows flying around with no place to nest.

Wasserman, who had already taken over a project under way at John Taft’s ranch, enlisted Ketner to help her expand the project to the new site, and increase the number of houses at the ranch.

The boxes measure about 5 inches by 5 inches by 10 inches high, ample room for the tiny birds, which are slightly larger than finches. In past years, all of the boxes have had nesters and fledglings in the spring, Wasserman said. More than 300 young swallows have been fledged at the Saticoy site and more than 2,500 of various species have been hatched at Taft Ranch.

“We’re excited to see what’s going to happen this year,” she said.