Welcome to a post-Thanksgiving edition of Saturday Morning Home Repair Blogging. I'm boatgeek, your host of the week. As always, we have a dedicated cadre of professionals and amateurs to help you tackle your home projects. The coffee's hot, the tea is strong, and the tryptophan is finally wearing off.
Follow me after the jump for a discussion of birdhouses.
So you want to put up a couple of birdhouses on your property? You have a couple of choices. You can go spend $20 on a birdhouse from the Web, or you can build one yourself. For most of this diary, I'll be talking about the "Basic Songbird House". This house takes about $5 in material (1 5/8"x6"x6' cedar fence board, rough if you can get it, plus about 15 screws or nails) and about an hour to build. I did mine on more of a production line basis, since I had a lot of scrap from building the fence. It took about 3 hours to put 7 houses together, all from re-used materials.
Here's a pic of an individual house on the bench
And one of the whole condo development
And finally, one on a post in the back yard. Four of the houses went on the fence last weekend, and the other three will go up at the local schoolyard in the spring. The kids love putting them together for Earth Day.
Plans for this house are here.
This house will support a lot of different birds, from wrens to swallows. Unfortunately, it will also support house sparrows, which are an invasive species from Europe. If you make the entrance hole smaller than 1 1/4", the sparrows won't be able to get in the opening, so you'll reserve the box for natives. If you make the entrance hole bigger so other bird species can fit, you can also harass invasive birds away as they start nest-building activities. Similarly, if you build a bigger box for larger birds, you might want to keep an eye out for starlings.
If you want to roll your own birdhouse, there are a lot of sizes given here for various different species. If you know what birds live in the neighborhood, you can customize the house for them. If you do go out on your own, here are a couple of things to consider:
- Do not install a perch on the outside! The resident birds are perfectly happy to land on the house roof or even on the front of the house itself. Putting in a perch gives predators somewhere to stand and harass the residents.
- If you use finished lumber, rough up the inside of the front of the house so that the parents and young birds can climb out easily.
- Paint as little as possible. Most wild animals prefer natural surfaces, so they're more likely to colonize your house if you leave the wood as God intended. Using cedar or other rot-resistant wood makes the houses last longer, so you get a few more seasons out of the house. I made one exception--putting a bead of caulk where the roof of the house meets the back. This will help the inside stay dry and disease-free.
Once you've built the house, put in some wood shavings to make a nice base for a nest. After the nesting season, you can clean out the old nest from the birdhouse. If the nests pile up too much, the eggs and baby birds can get too close to the entrance, leaving the vulnerable to predators. If you do have a predator problem, you can double up the thickness of the front panel right around the door, which makes it harder for predators to reach in.
For more resources, take a look at the WA Department of Fish and Wildlife's website. There are a lot of other bird and bat house designs, not to mention ways to deal with wildlife in your backyard. If you are in the Pacific Northwest, I'd also recommend two books: Living with Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest and Landscaping for Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest, both by Russell Link. Mr. Link wrote much of content on the WDFW websites, so the books have a wealth of information on dealing with problem animals (the first book) and attracting animals to your yard (the second).
Finally, a big shout-out to our good buddy CodeTalker. He's been herding us cats to diary on SMHRB, and he needs some support! If you can take a week, let him know in the comments.
OK, floor's open! What are you working on this long weekend?