Nesting Boxes

Now is the time to invite some birds to raise their families in your garden. Many birds eat garden pests; kestrels will even eat rodents. How to attract them? Nesting boxes will attract chickadees, wrens, finches, bluebirds, woodpeckers and kestrels that live in your area.

A nesting box can help solve another problem. If woodpeckers are trying to make a home in your house—not the birdhouse, but the house you live in—putting a nesting box over the place they are pecking will make them cease and desist. If the box is suitable, they’ll live in it. My brother’s neighbor, on the other hand, put a coffee can lid over the hole that woodpeckers were making in his house. The birds started another hole, and he put up another lid. Another hole and another lid followed. All the holes and lids are still there. Doesn’t that sound attractive?

Now, birds won’t live in just any birdhouse. Not all birdhouses are built for birds; some are built for decoration. Nesting boxes should replicate a hollow tree, these birds’ natural home: they should be made of untreated wood, have no perch, and have exactly the right size entrance for the kind of bird. Perches and oversized holes invite predators. The box should be vented at the top, the entry should have an overhang (think of an eave on a house), and have a means for a person to easily muck out the nest when the birds have gone.

Once you have the nesting box, place it at the right height for the kind of bird it’s for, point the entrance away from the street, and place the box near some cover (like a large bush or pine tree) for the protection of the baby birds when they leave the nest.

I would recommend Wild Bird Center (http://www.wildbirdcenter.com/) for nesting boxes; the hanging wren box I bought from them has been home to many clutches of chickadees.