Category Archives: english sparrows

Strange nesting places….

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Everyone probably has a funny bird nest story to share–after all, some birds are very resourceful and will nest in all sorts of places, including pockets in clothes on the clothesline, watering cans, flower baskets and window boxes. I’ve seen birds nesting up under awnings, in gutters and even in traffic lights. My favorite was the family of house finches that nested, not once, but 3 times, on a boat and fed the babies when the boat was in the harbor and waited for its return. Believe it or not, all 3 broods fledged and survived the transition to land….

Last fall we had to take down our beautiful old sugar maple. It had been sick a long time and finally died last summer. It hung over the street and had to come down according to the town. You can see the little wooden brace on the line that was put there by the power or cable company to protect the line from rubbing against the tree branches. When the tree came down, the little wooden brace remained.

It is a little over a foot and a half long and the hole is probably about 3″ in diameter. We always knew birds nested in it but it was also covered up by branches and leaves which gave the baby birds some place to crawl about and exercise their new wings. As you can see, this is no longer true.

I heard the babies before I saw the dad arrive to feed them with a mouth stuffed full of bugs. The female left when he arrived and this is himself after I ran inside to get my camera. He has already fed the little ones and will soon be in search of more bugs.

These are English sparrows, also called house sparrows and as I wrote in yesterday’s post on birdhouses, these non native birds are very aggressive, very successful nesters. This pair will probably be close to fledging 3 sets of young this year. It’s a long fall down to the road and sidewalk but I know that the sparrows down the road have made it from the stop light in a busy intersection every year so I am betting these little guys will make it, or that most of them will.

And you’ll be happy to know that they get most of their bugs from around my compost pile. I watch them go back and forth throughout the day. Sort of like a fast food restaurant….

Bird Houses…

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Do you put them up? Lots of people do but its a good thing to think about before you do. What birds are you hoping to attract? Lots of people want bluebirds but you can’t just put up a bird house in the backyard and expect the bluebirds to arrive unless your backyard is a nice open field or salt marsh…

This is the kind of space a bluebird loves….but you may also get tree swallows, wrens, titmice, chickadees or….house sparrows! House sparrows, also called English sparrows are innocuous looking sparrows that are actually very aggressive non native birds that will actually take over other bird’s nests in bird houses to claim them as their own…they will actually kill baby birds as well as the parent bird if they can.

A good bird house will probably need a reinforcement around the hole. Some birds like to have a perch but many do not need them.

This is what may happen to a bird house without reinforcement. Larger birds such as starlings, other non native and aggressive nesters, will enlarge the hole and many mammals such as mice and squirrels will also gnaw on them. Squirrels will also attack nesting birds and mice will move into the nest boxes in the fall and often remain there all winter. More than a few human nest checkers have been unpleasantly surprised to find a whole boxful of mice tumbling down when they open the box to clean it out….

It is hard to tell from this photo but this box is much larger and was put up next to this tree to hopefully attract a screech owl. These boxes really do attract screech owls but they also attract squirrels.

If you are going to put up a nest box, please consider the type of bird you want to attract, the time of year, the location and so on. Many suburban bird lovers end up attracting the very birds that are harming the native bird population so doing homework is very worthwhile. Also, even though those houses with multiple holes look attractive in the garden, they only attract house sparrows. Many people remember when purple martins were plentiful and hope to attract them, but again, do a little research to see if they are even in your area.

There’s a lot of great bird house and nest box information out there. Have some fun with it–kids love watching birds feed their babies. And maybe consider planting some of the trees and bushes birds like to nest in and leave that big old tree with woodpecker holes in it as a natural nesting lure.