I don’t know why it took me so long to think about putting up another bird house. The one Dave built for the Windowsons, for their chickadee manufacturing project, has been no end of fun. I just hauled it down to bleach it for the new rental season and it’s starting to show some wear, but it’ll be fine. Then I thought: how about if there’s another nest box on the other side of the house? We walked down to the Backyard Bird Shop and had us a look.
(By the way, I know a lot of you want to live with lots of space around you, and that’s understandable, but there’s something to be said for living where you can walk to a Backyard Bird Shop. A library. A grocery store (or three). Hardware store. Brewpub. Another brewpub. Another brewpub. Where was I? So I hope all you country mice are being great stewards of the land or at least not messing it up, but let’s hear it for jamming the bulk of humanity into well-planned cities, okay? We’re rambunctious and destructive, as a species, so we should keep most of us away from what sustains us.)
Bird house. That’s where I was. My eye was immediately drawn to a wall of small bird houses in fabulous colors, and I picked out the little red one and came home with it. I don’t expect Marge and Studley to be interested. The hole is an inch in diameter. Chickadees like their holes a quarter-inch larger. Might not seem like a big deal, but chickadees, quilters, and sloppy carpenters are all about the quarter-inch.
Now, I do not know what the little princesses do in the wild when these precise measurements do not pertain to a given tree-trunk. Seems like you could be house-hunting a long time before you find a nice 1-1/4 inch hole. Chickadees aren’t major excavators, but they are willing to chip away at a hole in a tree if someone else has already started it or there’s a knothole in soft wood, and that’s prety amazing, since their pointy parts are only the size of a fingernail clipping.
Anyway, I don’t expect a chickadee to want this red house. You need at least some clearance. Seems like it’s enough trouble to blast into a hole head-first and somehow apply the brakes inside before hitting the far wall, which is less than five inches away. What I’m looking for here is maybe a wren. We do have a lovely Bewick’s wren hanging around. She’s got her tail cranked straight up like one of those cats that’s super proud of its bunghole. But I’ll bet she knows how to flatten it if she’s coming in hot. We stuck the house in a tree and put wood shavings in it, per the advice of the Bird Shop maven.
I’ve heard this before. Chickadees and wrens are cavity nesters and like to work on holes that already have wood shavings in them. The idea is maybe it indicates someone else already used it and lived to tell the tale, or got a good start going on renovations and then ran out of cash and had to bail. According to one website, it “makes the bird feel like it is doing the work of hollowing out the cavity.” Awesome! I’m stocking up on gold stars to reward the bird. Maybe a trophy for Participation.
Do we really know this? Did someone put a bunch of sawdust in a nest box and conclude the birds liked it because they took it all out? Have they tried it with crumpled-up newspaper? Mac and cheese? Legos? Get back to me.
We have 12 nest boxes around our yard. Never once have we filled it with sawdust. We always have 100% occupancy. And then there are all the trees, shrubs, and bushes that we let grow instead of trimming them into shapes. We get plenty of nesters there, particularly catbirds, cardinals, and blue jays. They are pretty good at hiding their nests, though, because the only evidence I find of their nesting in our yard is the proliferation of all their young, sitting in bushes and begging for food from their parents.
Every autumn, we clean out the nest boxes, so that they will be ready to go for the next year. Also, it gives more space for birds to cram in there to keep each other warm in the winter.
I love that I can bird watch without even leaving my house!
You must have a lot of territory!
It's just a bit above average for the suburbs we live in. I really hate that most of my neighbors chose to cut down trees, have very few shrubs, bushes, or even plants of any sort, and just do the lawn thing. All the birds MUST come to Manderly, because that's the only place they can find food, water, and homes!
Your Bewick's wren looks a lot like the pair of Carolina wrens that visit my yard. I have a comfy chair in front of a sliding patio door from which I catalog all the visitors to the yard. Best idea ever.
Every few years I decided I'm going to at least keep a yard list, and then I don't.
Two things that have benefitted me through the plague are backyard birding and quarter-inching. And I’m with you on town living, too. We moved to our current place six years ago, planning to walk to nearly everything we need. Then I needed a hip replacement. Almost everything but the grocery closed. And my kids committed to living toward the West Coast. Huh.
We've still got a little room out here for you.
As a veteran Realtor, I have had many Chickadee clients and yes, they are sensitive to such details. (Sigh. Why can't they compromise on at least one aspect of a new house?) And concerning the idea of putting wood shavings into the bird house, I would point out that it is long-accepted industry knowledge that a staged home sells more quickly and for more money than one that is totally vacant. What this tells me is that these birds aren't so dumb after all. I guess it will soon become politically incorrect to refer to another human as a 'bird-brain', huh?
Since with bird-houses, it's more of a "sellers's market", perhaps these Chickadees shouldn't be so choosey. I wouldn't worry about the wood shavings OR the "cookie odor". After all, birds have a limited sense of smell anyway. And if a chickadee won't take it, someone else will. And Mrs. Chickadee will bitch at Mr. Chickadee about why he had to be all anal about the wood shavings and made them miss out on a great nest box.
I will now refer to all future wood-shavings transplants as "staging," thank you!
We have no nesting boxes – unless you count the hanging pots on our back deck. Some years ago a Pardalote pair dug into the soil (yes they are tunnelers) and made a fine nest. Hearing small birds chirp as we sat outside was wonderful. I do hope they come back this year.
I had to look up Pardalote. What a beautiful little bird! Our wrens are also tunnelers. They dig into our wall-planters, pull down a privacy curtain of dried grass and leaves around the entrance, and make their comings & goings just a momentary blur. I love them, even though they've made a mess and broken my pansies.
And if you've ever had your pansy broken, you know how painful that can be.
When I lived in Midcoast Maine I had three boxes up. Eastern bluebirds liked the one by the small pond in view of my west window. Tree swallows took ones in front and back. Chickadees only nested once. A male house wren stuffed a little decorative wren house full, I mean FULL of sticks but no lady ever showed. In the trees were song and tree sparrows, common yellowthroat, cedar waxwings, blue jays, bobolinks in the hayfields, robins. I miss that place.
I've heard that wrens will build several nests, giving the female the opportunity to decide which house she would like to live in. (So your wren might have had luck in a different location.) I've sometimes had a couple of half-built nest boxes, but I count them as occupied. It seems that other wrens don't build in these half-done nests. Probably the original wren chases him off, to keep his options open.
I have bobolinks as my ring tone. To this day I sometimes look around for them if my phone is sufficiently buried in my pocket, before remembering we don't HAVE bobolinks.
I have "Morning Bird Song" as my ringtone and you should see the funny looks people give when it chirps in a public place like a supermarket or an entry tunnel to an airplane.
If it's the Newark airport, they'll just figure it's the resident interior house sparrows.
I'm quite surprised to learn you hadn't put up more birdhouses before now. Just think if you had a dozen or so, Studley and Marge's entire descendant family could have been raising babies in your yard. I do hope you get a wren in the new house. Will you buy more houses?
Thinking about it! No harm trying, although I am only on a city lot (well, it's a double lot) and I always figured there wasn't enough territory or good hideage for multiple nests. We do have numerous tall firs and cedars nearby and the song sparrows and juncos nest on the ground.
In Old Town, Alexandria, where we lived until last month, we had Morning Doves nesting in the upstairs French door jamb corner (last year) and in a hanging fern (this year). Miss the latter as it was directly outside the kitchen sink window—what a show!
More ferns!
I don't know about the birds, but I do know some about the bees. They, too, seem to prefer a hive that has some older brood comb in it over new frames that don't have the lingering scent of a productive hive.