Our work continues after a project is completed. “Conservation of the European Roller in the Carpathian Basin (LIFE13/NAT/HU/000081)” project, which ended in 2020, has resulted in a significant increase in the European Roller population in the western part of Romania, partly due to the placement of over 800 artificial nests, thus ensuring long-term secure nesting sites. To maintain this success, we check the nests annually.

Unfortunately, each time we inspect these nests, we find a large number of them destroyed or missing without trace. This year out of 657 nests checked we found that 217 of them were destroyed and another 34 needed repair work.

Our drive to continue our work is given by the fact that, if almost ten years ago the European Roller was considered a rare bird in the western part of the country, as a result of conservation measures started under the LIFE project, in the first year of the project the number of nesting pairs increased to 84, and in year 5 there were already 217 pairs.

On our recent visit we were pleased to see 155 pairs nesting in the artificial nestboxes placed by us. In addition to this species, these were occupied by Little Owls (28), Common Starlings (8), Eurasian Scops Owls (8), Tree Sparrows (5), House Sparrows (4), Wrynecks (2), Common Kestrel, Western Jackdaw and Red-footed Falcon.