the mark haley holler: Even Birds Have Nests

Nuthatches cling to things upside down.

Birds are a funny part of life. The way people react to them. Many people love them, feed them, invite them to stay in houses/boxes, entice them with certain gardens, study them, watch them. Spend a year getting emails from the Cornell Institute of Ornithology and you'll see that it it possible to be positively obsessed with them. Right now, Cornell is "advertising" Big Day 2014, on which, presumably, birders can try to see 300 species in two states in a day. (See you there!)

Then again, I have, to my dismay, met at least one ornithophobe. She hated birds so much that she didn't even like the bird ornaments that the bookstore where we worked sold for Christmas. And who hasn't at least heard of the classic Alfred Hitchcock horror film The Birds? (If you haven't, you Philistine!)

One book I read recently (5th Wave by Rick Yancey-- Hunger Games fans, drop what you're doing and go get it now. Move, cadet, MOVE!) blames birds for being the delivery vehicle for a plague that wipes out most of humanity. Don't worry, though. It's the aliens that engineered the plague, so I don't think we have anything immediate to worry about. Birds are everywhere, no matter what you think of them.

They're Morning Glory, okay! Sheesh!

If you're reading this blog, you probably have an inkling of where I stand on the issue. As a fledgling birder (pun intended) it has been a good month for me. Since our decrepit martin house blew off its pole and exploded during one of the winter storms that preceded 2014, I have taken my digits and all my scrap plywood in my hands and begun an odyssey with power tools. I still have ten digits, thank you. I also have mediocre painting skills and three new bird houses. Two of the bird houses are probably not much good for actual birds. House Wrens or Chickadees might be willing to try them if I found the right place to mount them. That's what happens when I say to myself, "Any idiot can build a bird house." I become a bird house building idiot.

Once I'd made the ornamental houses and placed them, I began to observe a pair of birds who came daily to investigate them. The birds seemed less than impressed, but maybe a bit desperate. Gotta deposit the eggs somewhere. These were some really acrobatic birds, too. The swooped and dove and glided and burbled at each other in little voices like a whistle through water. The male tipped me off with his iridescent blue-green back. Tree Swallows. Tree Swallows eat bugs in the thousands, same as Purple Martins. They nest in cavities in looser colonies than martins and like to be near water. But.... they need deep cavity boxes with ample floor space to protect their large broods of up to seven young from natural enemies--the ever pestilential European Starling. Back to the sawing board!

Awesome aerial photo of male tree swallow that only
took half an hour of sitting on a fence post to get...

It was okay, though. I remembered some left over ends of cedar fence slats that we'd used in making our box garden last year that were the perfect size, and I had finally figured out how to use the table saw to cut "bevels" (technical wood working term that means all slanty-wise) so I knocked this house together with a minimum of swearing... Well, except for when the back slat split in half and I had to repair it with glue, lath strips, and panel nails, but what's a little invective among friends? Far more difficult, actually, was the base I made to mount the house on the top of the pole where the old martin house resided. That took three tries to get right before, as the saying goes, "If you build it, they will come."

Abraham in the grass, trying
to figure out why Mommy is
sitting on a fence post being
bird-brained.

Happily ever after... Until the other two swallow pairs showed up and the aerial battles began. Back to the sawing board again...

Easter eggin'...

In other news, the April showers have, as always, brought the May flowers and Spring seems to have decided to play nice now. Weather has been lovely since Easter at least, and some of my perennial favorites have shown their faces, such as: