When I acquired the property in 2012 there were a number of decrepit bird houses spread around the property. The roofs had fallen in and they had not been occupied for a few years.
After putting up bird houses during the last three years there are now a total of eight new houses on the property that were constructed by humans. In March, 2013, I put up five houses – four that I made myself and one that a neighbour gave me. This year I made three more and put them out in the field. The diameter of the entry holes is either one and a half inches or one and an eighth inches. The larger diameter is sized for blue birds and the smaller is for chickadees and house wrens. The following four pictures illustrate the different designs used in the construction.
The smallest inside dimensions of the box shaped houses are about four inches by four inches for the floor and about six inches to the ceiling. Note the “natural log” style bird house that consists of a length of hollow tree log with a floor and roof attached to the bottom and top. Would you agree that one style resembles a chalet in the Swiss Alps?
Of the houses I built this year I added a diamond shaped block of wood over the entry hole. Hopefully, this added thickness around the entry hole will hinder the actions of self-styled carpenter birds. As you can see in the first picture below the carpenter birds (wood peckers) added their own touch to the structure of one house that was built two years ago. To make the house liveable again for blue birds I tacked on a new entry door like that shown in the second picture below. But, almost immediately the carpenter birds did their “home improvement” as shown in the third picture below.
After constructing the houses over the past few years I think two design features should be standard in new house construction. One is to have either a side door or a removable roof to facilitate cleaning. Although normally the houses are cleaned out in early March every year, if the nest gets rented out to an undesirable tenant such as a house sparrow, opening a side door or the lifting off the top permits checking who the residents are before destroying the nest. If the house can only be cleaned out by removing the floor, the whole nest falls out before you can check the nationality of the residents. A couple of the houses that I built suffer from this flaw. The other is to design the entry hole to discourage wood peckers, IE, by adding an extra layer of wood around the door.
This year I mounted the bird houses on steel posts as you can see in the above picture. It is easy to pound the posts into the ground anywhere you want and by using eight foot long posts the house will be about five feet off the ground. To discourage snakes and other critters from visiting the residents I put up a length of metal drain spout around the post to make climbing more difficult.
Oliver(holding the birdhouse in the following picture) came all the way from Germany to provide some of that well known German engineering expertise during the installation of one birdhouse.
