Active trapping

First off, caught my first starling (which didn't escape) today! I transferred it to the V trap and hope to start luring his buddies in.

I will be posting pictures of the adjustments I made to the system, as well as my first bird pictures too. But there's no slot for my SD chip on this computer machine, so those will come later.

This is a picture of a trap made by Richard Van Vleck. I don't know how the internals work, but I have attempted to reverse engineer it, or at least how I would build it.

He describes it as having a dropping floor and a sweeping wall. By looking at the roof I imagine the wall pivots and keeps in close proximity to it. The floor drops when the bird lands in the bottom of the cavity, and the doo hickey hanging off the side appears to be the counter balance which would move up and down in that slot. When the floor drops down the bird drops into the pipe in the bottom, from that point it is similar to the Nest Box set up.

Here is what I would make the inside look like.

 I would make it out of light sheet metal. Here's a preliminary template. Though this model isn't to scale, I would make each square 5"x5" or 6"x6".

Then I would bend the sheet metal like the following. The hole will match the hole in front exactly so that as soon as the floor drops, the entrance hole will be closed off very quickly. I would rivet the side wall tab to the floor tab.

The side is the rounded one, the floor has the two flanges, and then the back.

I would drill a hole through the two flanges under the back wall for the hinge axle. I'm still cogitating about putting the counter balance along the side wall flange or center it in the floor.