A Western Bluebird parent feeds its young at a nest box at the Lake County Land Trust's Rodman Preserve. Photo by Brad Barnwell.

LOWER LAKE, Calif. – The upcoming meeting for the Redbud Audubon Society, to be held at the Lower Lake School House Museum on Jan. 19, starting at 7 p.m. will focus on creating Bluebird habitat.

Speaker Georgette Howington of the California Bluebird Recovery Program (CBRP) will give a PowerPoint presentation about these cavity nesting birds and how to monitor nest boxes. She will give a brief history of the program, which was originally started in 1976.

Howington will talk about why the program is such a successful conservation effort, and how monitoring next boxes can be a wonderful, satisfying and relaxing hobby.

She has been a nest box monitor for the California Bluebird Recovery Program for 10 years and is the Contra Costa/Alameda County coordinator.

Lake County has a bluebird trail program that was started over 15 years ago by Jeannette Knight of Redbud Audubon who not only constructs bluebird boxes but has installed them at both Anderson Marsh State Historic Park and the Rodman Preserve, owned and operated by the Lake County Land Trust.

Anyone can have a “bluebird trail,” on their property, but it is important to install the boxes properly with predator protection a top priority and to clean the boxes on a regular basis. Monitoring of the boxes and reporting the information to the CPRB takes this effort one step farther.

CRPB encourages nestbox construction, creation of bluebird trails and annual monitoring of bluebird nesting outcomes.

By 2010 CBRP had created 265 bluebird trails across California and had 174 trail monitors. A total of 20 County Coordinators manage the program on a local level.

The public is cordially invited to this free program. The Redbud Audubon Society has started to vary its meeting locations to both north and south county locations.

From January through April the meetings will be held at the Lower Lake Historical School House Museum on the east end of the town of Lower Lake.

For more information about the Redbud Audubon Society, go to www.redbudaudubon.org.