Do you, or do you not know about the bird?
May 16th, 2009 by Mark
I recently built a birdhouse for our backyard. I went down to the library and took out “The Backyard Birdhouse Book” by René and Christyna M. Laubach. I was very happy with this book. It gave a lot of good, practical details about building birdhouses that actually benefit birds. If you want to build a birdhouse that looks like a drug store, this isn’t the book for you. It went in to detail about what type of birds lived in my area, what they needed from a birdhouse, and then had in-depth instructions on how to build the appropriate bird house (which they call nestboxes in the book).
After deciding on the house that I was going to build I picked up some lumber and borrowed my father’s table saw to cut out all of the pieces. I then assembled it, sanded it, and painted it. I chose to use a “Noel Wire Racoon Guard” to protect the residents from predators like squirrels, racoons and cats. Okay, so on to the pictures.
This is a shot of the completed birdhouse. You can see the noel wire racoon guard, which is the green vinyl covered hardware cloth that encircles the entrance. The ends of the guard have had the vinyl removed and been snipped on an angle to make them sharp. This should make it very uncomfortable for predators trying to gain access to the bird house.
The roof of the birdhouse can be removed so you can monitor the birds inside without disturbing them very much.
One of the sides pivots open to make it easy to clean out the previous year’s nest every Spring.
Here’s a close-up of the birdhouse after it was mounted in the tree.
Finally, here’s a wide-angle shot of the birdhouse in the tree.
I’m really very happy with how the birdhouse came out. I can’t wait until a bird moves in. It is probably too late in the season to get birds moving in to it this year. But, it will be weathered and ready for next year. If birds do move in I’ll be sure and post some pictures.
Oh, and by the way, the title of this post is a reference to a clip from the Family Guy episode titled “I dream of Jesus” where Peter keeps singing Surfin’ Bird. It’s one of my favorites.
