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How to build a birdhouse

April 13, 2013 by schoolhousekat

Have I mentioned that I am obsessed with birds? I am. I want them to come live in my garden. Lots of them.

So, in true DIY fashion, I decided to make some houses for them to come and live in. It’s actually super simple. To make a birdhouse you need five pieces: front and back, sides, and floor. If your house has a flat roof, the roof is number six. If you decide to do something different with the roof, there will be more pieces for that.

You’ll need a power drill, screws (my favorite are Fin trim), a regular drill bit and a really big one to drill the hole for the birds to come in and out. Oh, and a chop saw. You could probably do it with a hand saw but it would take a long time and be hard. With a chop saw it’s a breeze.

You know how the first time you make a new recipe you follow the recipe exactly, and then after that you start messing with it and adding your own twist – lemon zest, or a pinch of chili flakes, or a sprinkle of freshly grated nutmeg? That’s what I did with birdhouses. The first time, I found a plan and followed it exactly. I made a small, square birdhouse for blue birds (also attractive to chickadees and finches). Steve did the same thing with his first birdhouse but he used painted wood and made a little Western style facade so it’s cuter than my first one:

Steve's first birdhouse

The more I read about birdhouses, the more confident I got. Birds apparently really care about the size of the hole – too small and they can’t get in; too big and predators can follow them. A red bellied woodpecker, for example, wants a hole that’s 2 1/2″ in diameter, whereas a bluebird or swallow box should have a 1 1/2″ hole. They also care about how far from the floor the hole is. And of course, the bigger the bird, the bigger the house: according to my bird house building bible, an eastern bluebird house should have a floor that’s 4″ square while western and mountain bluebirds need 5″ because they have more babies (or, in birder terms, “bigger clutches”). But beyond that, no one seems sure what matters.

So my second time around, I decided to have a little fun.

I decided to try a peaked roof instead of flat

The secret to the five basic pieces is to cut them out of one board if you can so they’re all the same width. This was a 5″ wide board, so a 5″ piece made a square floor. The front and back are the same length and width – they go on first.

Attach the front and back first - two screws each is plenty

The sides fit between the front and back. They are the same width, but a bit shorter since they will hang in between the front and back and sit on top of the floor. However thick your floor is, that’s how much shorter the sides should be than the front and back. Attach one side at the top and bottom. Attach the other just at the top, so that it will swing on those top screws like a hinge and you can open it to clean out the house.

Birdhouse before hole - see how the side fits right in there?

The roof can be out of anything, allegedly, but it shouldn’t be too thin as you don’t want it to heat up too much and fry your baby birds. I used old wine barrel staves for this one. Then you need some drainage holes in the bottom – use a 1/4 inch drill bit for these – and depending on how snugly your roof fits, some air holes along the roof line.  Then take that big spade drill bit and drill the hole in the front an inch below the roof. I also added a perch, just for fun, although I still don’t know if it’s a good idea – some birds like them and some don’t. And a piece of driftwood for the roofline.

Then I really got crazy. Last summer I stripped some log pieces and I’d been saving the bark ever since and one piece just really spoke to me.

Peaked roof birdhouse and hobbit house with bark roof

I think they are super cute but it really doesn’t matter what I think – it’s all about whether the birds think so too.

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Bird Nerd

April 7, 2013 by schoolhousekat

Since I still have a day job, I’m not quite ready for my Big Year – the quintessential bird watcher’s epic journey so memorably depicted in the mediocre yet entertaining Steve Martin movie of the same name. But perhaps because I have a day job, on weekends I have found myself becoming endlessly fascinated with birds.

And because I am fascinated by birds and with birds and I like to build things, I am now officially obsessed with birdhouses. The obsession started last year, when swallows actually moved into a birdhouse we’d bought at a flea market.

This is the birdhouse we bought

These are the baby birds that actually matured and fledged!

Then my husband bought me a very cool book that has tons of great information about how to grow things and make things. I’m sure it’s very useful if you actually live on a farm but if you don’t it’s almost as good; it’s kind of like reading a travel guide to a place you want to go but can’t figure out when or how to get there . And it has lots of information about birds and birdhouses – what size certain birds like, how big the hole should be, how far from the floor it should be – all kinds of stuff. When I’d read it I really felt like a Bird Nerd. Especially when I began to put it into practice by building birdhouses. But that’s the next blog post. For now, here’s the most exciting thing that’s happened this spring – a swallow is checking out our birdhouse! This is what inspires someone like me to build more. And more . And more.

This is a swallow moving into the birdhouse my dear friend Stephanie gave us

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These big wheels gotta roll

December 16, 2012 by schoolhousekat

Two years ago, when I was laid up with a broken ankle, I moved our project along by snarfing things off Craigslist and sending Steve out to get them. He returned from one of these trips with a confession: “I also bought some wagon wheels.” Some? “Well, four. They were a really good price and they’re pretty cool. They’re big.” How big? “Two are really big and two are just kind of big.”  What are we going to do with them? “I don’t know. I figured we could use them somehow.”

Honey, I bought some wagon wheels

Here’s the thing. Some women’s husbands come home with red Porsches or teen-aged baby sitters, so when you think about it that way, coming home with four vintage wagon wheels – even four humongous vintage wagon wheels – is not really so bad. But it is true that we didn’t know what to do with them, so they just sat by the side of the house for a while. A long while.

Wheels, leaning and waiting

This summer we moved them up to the Schoolhouse and started figuring out how we could make them into a deck railing. The biggest challenge was weight. Two of them weighed about 90 pounds each and the other two about 50 pounds each.

Cool galvanized plumbing parts

Steve collected a bunch of cool plumbing parts called prethreaded pipe joints and started designing an attachment system.

The first wheel looked pretty cool

It looked really cool.

Detail of first wheel attachment system - note the multiple joints

But the wheels were too heavy and it collapsed.

Lo, are the mighty fallen

Eventually, a simple solution was deemed best.

Note simplicity of design, with few joints

And once we figured that out, it was just a matter of lifting them up and bolting them on.

Just a matter of bolting them on

Plunging off the hot tub deck down into the garden is now one less thing to worry about.

Deck with wagon wheel railing

 

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Friends and Enemies

August 25, 2012 by schoolhousekat

Our garden looks fabulous. It’s not planned, or tamed, or formal in any way – it’s a carnival, a sideshow, a veritable riot of color and texture and things falling over each other and that’s the way I like it. It’s also making us a lot of friends: the swallows are gone but we have tons of bees and hummingbirds and earthworms and chickadees and even the occasional California Quail.

Summer garden

But with friends come enemies.

This is our cherry tree. We bought it bare root and planted it in early summer and it’s leafed out really well:

Cherry tree

Looks pretty good, right? Wait, look closer:

Uh oh

And closer:

Houston, we have ...

And really close. Eeew.

... a problem.

Yes, Houston, we have a problem. Specifically, as a quick Google search on “worms on cherry tree” tells me, with pear slugs, otherwise know as cherry slugs. What to do? Another Google search of course, this time on “cherry slugs,” which are not actually slugs but sawfly larvae (Caliroa cerasi). Which brings me to a number of sites that can tell me what to do. U.C. Davis, helpfully enough, advises Spinosad, Spinetoram, and Diazenon. I’m not sure what those are but I know I don’t have them lying around and I’m not sure I’d want to use them in the garden if I did. Colorado State suggests malathion (that would be a “no”) in the event a strong jet of water doesn’t work but in closing notes that “Pear slugs are also readily killed by applications of wood ashes.”

Now THOSE I have. Gloves, a scoop, and a trip over to the fire pit and I’m ready to go.

Wood ash - who knew?

It’s a pretty quick application, although the ash tends to blow around and I don’t know how you’d do this on a full sized tree:

No mercy

My little tree now sports a light dusting of wood ash. I hope it works, but if it doesn’t and you know of something that does (other than malathion) please share!

Summer snow

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Of Birdhouses and Barn Swallows, or, HIRUNDO ERYTHROGASTER Boddaert

July 4, 2012 by schoolhousekat

I started a new job in mid-April and I LOVE LOVE LOVE it but it kicks my butt in the time-for-projects department so here we are, mid-summer, July 4th in fact (happy birthday USA!) and I haven’t done much for the last few months except work, which is not what this blog is about. But the swallows, at least, have been busy in the garden.

Here is our birdhouse. When we put it on top of the ladder near the fire pit, we didn’t actually think any birds would move in. But guess what? Swallows will nest pretty much anywhere that’s high up and protected.

Bird house in the garden

Swallows, as it turns out, are quite fascinating. According to Wikipedia they are not especially fast flyers, which is hard to believe when you see them swoop around and up and down and then straight into the bird house so fast you can’t believe they don’t hit the back wall, and they often enter a mutualist relationship with Ospreys, building their nests underneath the large, flat Osprey nests and benefitting from scraps while alerting their neighbors to potential predators.

Birdzilla.com has all kinds of fascinating facts about swallows, including that they spend more time on the wing than any other passerine birds; “assuming that it flies at the rate of a mile a minute, for ten hours a day, and lives ten years, it would fly 2,190,000 miles, or over 87 times around the earth; this is doubtless too high an estimate, but it is impressive, even if greatly discounted.”

But I think the most fascinating thing about swallows is that they are raising a family in our birdhouse.

Can you see me?

Can you see me now?

Can you see me NOW?

 

How 'bout NOW?

 

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