Bird Houses

When I retired (almost five years ago now), Jackie, with whom I very much enjoyed working for several years, kindly gave me a book of bird house plans. She had figured out by then that I liked to build things. Indeed! In the last few weeks, I made nine different bird houses. One was a special Chickadee house for Anders and his mom. Then I made two Wren houses for my friend Dick. Finally, I made six houses for myself to take to the lake--two Chickadee houses, two Nuthatch houses, and two Robin nesting boxes. All were made of cedar.

We are at the lake now, and I brought my six houses here to Wisconsin. Here is one of the Chickadee houses in a red pine tree.

Here is one of the Nuthatch houses mounted atop what remains of a dead popple tree. We have lost lots of these trees, which aren't very resistant to wind when they get old, plus several recent dry years have been hard on them. They are very, very tall and usually snap off about 20 or 30 above the ground, leaving a tall, unsightly stump. The plan for the Nuthatch houses suggested mounting them on a stump, so I cut two of those stumps off at about 14 feet high and mounted these houses there. The stumps will rot and want to fall eventually, but maybe we will get a few good years of Nuthatch residency before that happens.

A Robin has repeatedly built nests just under our deck in spots that made it difficult for us to avoid disturbing it. So, I blocked off those spots, and mounted my Robin nesting boxes a little more out of the way where we can watch them from inside and, I hope, disturb them less. Now if the Robins will only go along with the plan! You can see that these are less a house than a protected place for an open Robin's nest.

Kathie snapped this picture of me attaching one of the Nuthatch houses to a popple stump. We can easily see the new Chickadee and Nuthatch houses from our deck. I hope they find them and find them suitable for nesting.

On a different note, Kathie took the camera along this morning on her dog walk. The weather here has been wonderful during the day, but the nights still dip down into the 20s. She found two puddles in the road with very interesting ice formations on them. Quite the artistic shots, I think.

Today, I got the hot tub put back into operation, so we might try it out one of these cool nights. Otherwise, we have been cleaning up fallen trees and doing other spring maintenance jobs. Hope to see some of you faithful readers here this summer!