It’s spring and as usual I am paying close attention to the birds experiencing homelessness around here, and doing what I can. Thing about the homeless is, you can build them nice stout shelter but it doesn’t mean they’re going to use it. They’ll just hang onto their skeezy little holes in a snag somewhere and poop all over things.

We’ve done okay in the past. The little box Dave built that our chickadees Marge and Studley Windowson occupied had always attracted someone, either a Windowson or a facsimile, or, one year, a star-crossed nuthatch pair that bollixed things up nine ways to Sunday. But it was an attractive box. It was mounted mere inches from our window. Even after the big cascara tree that shaded it fell down, birds took over the lease. But I don’t think they did all that well. There was no camouflage anymore, they were right out in the open, and it might have gotten too hot. I took it down, along with Studley’s last abandoned nest.

Meanwhile, I stuck a little red house in the Styrax tree and nabbed some nuthatches right away, who smeared the front of it with sticky sap and made a mess and a nest and then abandoned it.

The next year I put the little red house on a tall upright where we could observe it from the patio, and some chickadees built a nest and put some eggs in it, but crows could also observe it from a point about two inches above the entry hole, and the chickadees got the hell out of Dodge. I can’t blame them. In fact my entire new friendship with crows has probably ruined my reputation with the rest of the songbirds. Don’t tell me they’re not paying attention: I know better.

Then I got the bright idea of putting a really good box up in the eaves under the front porch, where we could sit and watch—that’s a theme—and I thought that would work out well because any number of birds will nest in your hat if you hang it by the front door. I got a really nice nest box from a local craftsman with all the right dimensions and an easy clean-out, but I hung it up last year in April, and nobody was interested.

I’d already observed that my birds were scouting out territory as early as February and generally had something picked out by the end of March, even if they didn’t start stitching the mattress together. I figured they hadn’t had enough time to fully appreciate the nice new box. So I left it up all winter.

Meanwhile, this spring I relocated the little red box to the Styrax again, but this time higher up and closer to the trunk. Two chickadees were checking it out within the hour. I was thrilled.

Which brings us to now. The porch box is the best nest box for a mile and nobody has so much as poked a beak in it. I KNOW they can see it. Studley could spot a mealworm from a block away. Birds are hanging out in the wisteria on the porch all the time. I hung up a fat blob of Dave’s beard hair nearby—who could resist?

Pretty much everybody. The red-box chickadees haven’t come back after their initial investigation and I’ve seen zero activity in the new box. I’ll probably just have to donate money to some do-gooder organization like Audubon and leave the direct action to others. It’s what I do.