Houses on Halloween

It was way too pretty a sunny Saturday, yesterday, to spend indoors.  A long week and things that needed doing indoors were conniving to keep ProfessorRoush inside, but around 2:00 the call of the sunshine just grew too strong.  Surely, there must be something to do outside?

Ah, Bluebird house maintenance!  I'm a little early this year running my bluebird trail.  Normally, I'm doing this on a cold day in late November or early December, but I'll take the high 60's and sunshine anytime.  I skipped the bluebird trail last year entirely so it was doubly important that I get out there and clean house, so to speak, this year; clean house after house, after house and after house, twenty-four houses in all spread over my 20 acres and overlooking all the neighbors.  

I always start out loaded down with screwdrivers and wire and nails and wood screws and a hammer and wire cutters, because every year a house will need its roof repaired or the house need to be held tighter against a post.  I've learned, over the years, that paper wasps also like these boxes, some designs more than others (I think my newer house design had less paper wasps this year).  Bluebirds aren't harmed by the wasps but don't like to nest in houses with wasp nests, so I always carefully remove the wasp nests from every home.  I just read today that rubbing a bar of soap on the inner ceiling of the birdhouse will deter the wasps, so I'll have to try that next year. 

Some of my bluebird houses are getting quite old, showing gray weathered wood and splintered sides.  I believe I made the box above more than 10 years ago and from this closeup, you can see the patina and lichens it has accumulated, character and wisdom from the Kansas seasons.  It may look ancient and rundown, but it still housed a nest last year and that's what counts.  

Bluebirds aren't the most fantastic nest architects on the planet, a thin bed of grass is about all they place in the box, but it seems to do the trick.  I was really proud this year of the results of my NABS-approved Roush Bluebird Nestbox; twenty unmistakable bluebird nests, 20 nests in of 24 boxes, a personal best.  Or rather a personal best of my bluebird tenants.  I attribute the increased count to moving some of the boxes that previously attracted wrens to other areas away from the woods.  Two of the four remaining boxes had anemic nests that I didn't count, perhaps occupied a year ago, or perhaps there was trouble during the nest-building.  Who knows?  A snake reaching a box in the summer, a jilted male bluebird without a mate, or another bird attempting to move in.  Maybe next year, with the new porch and straightened shutters of my repairs, some poor lonely male bluebird will have a better chance to attract a mate.  Hope springs eternal in the rusty breast of a bluebird.
   

PS:  I found that the links to the Roush NABS-approved Bluebird Nestbox don't work in the original post as linked above, so I placed them on a separate page here in the blog.  Look at the top for the "Bluebird House/Presentations" tab!

On the Bluebird Trail

January 5, 2019.  Dear Garden,

As the temperature reached 55ºF early today, on its way to a high of 64ºF at 3:21 p.m., I was easily coaxed into the garden under the bright sun for puttering and the more puttering.  My gardening readers may be ringing your calloused hands over climate change, but if my 64ºF day is evidence of climate change, then I'm happy with it.   As you recall, Garden, my main goal for the beautiful day was to clean out the bluebird boxes, in preparation for another bluebird nesting season.


I've posted before about my bluebird trail and my own NABS-approved bluebird box, so you know already that this is one of my gardening focuses for normative ecology and species survival.  What I haven't pointed out before is that one of the reasons you MUST clean out these boxes annually is to eliminate paper wasp nests from the boxes.  Wasps and bluebirds don't get along.  You can't just swipe out the remnants of the nest, you have to look high into the boxes (photo at right) and remove any wasp nests.  In 22 bird boxes, there was evidence of 11 bluebird nests.  That doesn't sound too spiffy, but I have a number of old boxes in areas where I don't expect bluebirds to nest (near the woods).  There were 6 other boxes filled with nests and 5 empty ones.  All the empty ones had enormous wasp nests and about half of the bluebird nesting boxes did as well.

It was a great day to be out and to increase my Vitamin D production, but my happiest surprise of the day was the discovery of some beaver activity in the pond.  Not a huge number of chewed trees, but one substantial one around 8 inches in diameter (photo at left), and a few other smaller saplings in the process of removal (photo below). It's been about 15 years since the last beaver lived in the pond and I think the late fall rains brought them upstream into wetter-than-previous areas.  If this one stays or brings his family next year, I'm all for them clearing the pond of all the willows that have sprung up on the shoreline in the past decade.

After my bluebird-inspired hike, I puttered away a number of small chores that need to be done in preparation for spring.  A large orange pot, evidently not-frost proof, had disintegrated and needed to be trashed.  A little barbed wire needed to be re-stretched.  Some apple tree rootstock sprouts had to be pruned away.  A few unsightly, dead petunias needed to be ripped up and thrown on the compost pile.  All in all a great January day with February weather.  Here's to hoping we are planting peas early this year!

Particular Animals

ProfessorRoush took advantage of a mid-January warm spell yesterday to put out and mount the new bluebird houses that I made after my "check-and-clean-the-nests" weekend in November.  I haven't blogged about it, but I needed to replace several older bluebird houses after my inspection and I went a little crazier than normal and had made eight new bluebird houses (per the Roush NABS-approved plans) in a single 3-hour span on the weekend of  Thanksgiving.  And yesterday, knowing that Eastern Bluebirds normally start looking for suitable nest lodgings in February in this area, I thought I'd better be getting the new birdhouses up for the early arrivals while the weather was nice.


I found, however, that the bluebirds are already back (if in fact they ever left) and they were thumbing their noses at the new houses, in effect saying to me, "we don't need no new stinking houses!"  On my back hill, I ran into this pair (which I have denoted by arrows if you click on the photo or look closely), clustering around one of my older, more run-down houses, and I was most delighted to see them.  As I took this single photo from a distance, they decided I was close enough and they flew away, ahead of me, to the next house on the fence line, so I'm quite sure they've been checking out the neighborhood and already have a good idea of property values and proximity to water and food sources.  This Mrs. Bluebird seems to be pretty happy with the home that her male picked out.  Maybe "new" isn't as appealing to bluebirds as weather-beaten and old?  Maybe they don't like the smell of new cedar?  There's no accounting for taste, especially when it comes to the nest-warmer of the couple.

I continued to place out new houses and reposition some older houses on my walk.  I have probably overbuilt the neighborhood, since bluebird pairs don't like to nest within sight of others, but I want every azure visitor to my 20 acres to have a home, even if some end up being homes for wrens.  At least the carefully-sized entrances seem to keep the ubiquitous sparrows out. 

While traipsing around the bottoms, I also needed to check on the donkeys, who hadn't been seen in several very cold days, and I found them to be fine.  I was amused that this hay bale, deposited in the bottom for their eating convenience and for better nutrition than the dry prairie grass, seems to be hollowed out, the better preserved grass on the inside eaten first.  Who would have thought that donkeys, as well as bluebirds, could be so particular about their homes and food?  Certainly not their gardening landlord.




 

Nesting Sunday

Last Sunday, ProfessorRoush was really wanting to rest and read, but the outside weather was so temperate (55ºF) and sunny that I just couldn't make myself stay put indoors.  I also knew that if I stalled cleaning out the bluebird houses any longer, it would only lead to the task being critical later when the temperatures were 20ºF and a blizzard was forming.  If you're responsible for a trail, you can't just let it go.  The bluebird houses need occasional repair and removing the old nests decreases parasite and disease incidence.  And I needed a walk, so the Bluebird Trail was calling out to me from the brown prairie. "Come out, Come out.  I need your care."  Perhaps, ProfessorRoush was just, himself, nesting for winter.



I always gain a nice warm fuzzy feeling as I find all those nests where happy little bluebirds and various other species have raised a family under my roof(s).  When you are walking a trail of houses, you can easily tell the ones that hold bluebird nests because their nests are thin and haphazardly constructed, usually of soft prairie grass, as pictured in the top photo.  Other birds, usually wrens, sometimes nest in my boxes, and those nests are formed of coarser twigs like the one at the left.  They are also loaded much higher, sometimes stuffing the box to the top except for the opening entrance.   This year, of my 19 self-designed, NABS-approved nesting boxes scattered over the edges of 20 acres with another 80 acres around them, I counted 10 bluebird nests, 6 wren nests, and 3 empties.  The empties were all houses laying on the ground where the donkeys had rubbed them off the posts.  Donkeys seem to have something against random bird houses around their pastures. 

Walking the perimeter of my land is always educational as well.  I was surprised to notice this small nest within a dried up Babtisia australis (Blue Wild Indigo) floating around the pasture.  These prairie legumes bloom early in spring and normally grow perhaps 2.5 feet tall and round alone or in clumps over the prairie.  In the fall, they dry up, break off, and blow all over the prairie like tumbleweeds, clogging fences and flower beds and becoming perfect tinder for prairie fires.  I've never known that they might serve as shrub hosts for low nesting birds, but here is the proof, a deep little cup formed within what was once thick green foliage. 




You can see, in the closeup at left, the careful construction and perfect form of the nest.  It seems a little big for hummingbird, but whatever was here was a pretty small little guy/girl.  I would put odds on it being a Dickcissel nest, since that species is ubiquitous on the prairie and nests on the ground or in low prairie shrubs.  Whoever the architect was, I hope it was a safe home, because birds and the prairie are meant to be together.

Housebound Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving, yes, and outside the wind is howling and the rain is coming down in sheets.  We had planned to visit my son in Colorado today, but a bad forecast and a winter storm watch convinced me that the return trip tomorrow might be a dangerous thing, and so, here we sit, Bella and I, staring out the window into the storm.  The photo to the right is from a happier moment, yesterday, when we took advantage of the last warm day to play in the sun.  Bella likes to hold the frisbee with her paws and doesn't give it up easily after she retrieves it.

Thankfully, my fall garden-related chores are essentially complete.  Hoses are drained and stored, peonies and irises and daylily beds hacked down, and the lawn mower oil has been changed, blades sharpened, and gas preservative run through.    Out the back window, the garden has entered dormancy and has turned to sienna, ocher, and umber, colors that are enhanced when the fall rains come to the prairie as you can see in the garden and distant hills below.   I wish I had not yet cut down the tall native prairie grasses in the foreground (see the bottom picture below), but in the midst of this dry fall I had given up on seeing any moisture and I wanted to stem the incursion of the field mice and rabbits this winter.  And "plant" the seeds of this year's penstemon.

Along with the fall chores of the cultured garden, one of my annual chores is to clean out the eighteen birdhouses that I've placed on the the periphery of the twenty acres I call home.  The trek up and down the property provided a perfect opportunity for me to photograph the house and gardens from the back hill, a clear Kansas sky presiding over the scenery on a gorgeous fall day early in November.  This is an overview that I don't think I've shown on this blog before.  The hill in the foreground falls away to a farm pond, hidden out of the bottom frame of the photo below, and then rises again to the house and barn.  The overall garden looks small from this vantage.

My "bluebird trail" and the Professor-Roush-customized bluebird houses were unusually successful this year, perhaps due to the extra moisture of this past spring.  Thirteen of 18 houses appeared to have fledged bluebirds, containing the thin grass nests characteristic of the species.  Four other houses, all near the woods and pond, contained the deep stick-formed nests of wrens, and one decrepit old commericial house contained only a dead wasp nest.  Thirteen bluebird nests is a PR for this little spot of land, a moment worthy of contemplation and celebration.

On the morning of the bluebird-house-cleaning, the back garden was just waking with the sun, long shadows aimed west, and somehow duller, and ready for winter.  Seen here, below, you can see the shoulder-tall height of the native bluestem that I have since mowed off.  I am always torn between leaving them unmown to capture the moisture of the winter snows and to witness the joyous rusty tones they exhibit when wet, but one of the reasons I cut them down is so that the seeds of the forbs among them drop closer, spread only by the whirring mower and hidden in the debris in hopes of increasing their density.  Spring penstemon and fall echinacea are always welcome and appreciated here in my prairie garden.   Now if only next spring would hurry up and come along.

   

 

Bluebird Harvest

While I was harvesting pecans, I was also taking advantage of that beautiful November Saturday to make my Bluebird house rounds.  I would rather do this annual chore now, in the sunshine and mild wind, traipsing up and down the hills through the tall grass, before the world gets cold and breezy again.

I'm pleased to report that 11 of 19 boxes, were occupied by Bluebirds this year, a record for me.   Eight of the eleven were boxes of my own North American Bluebird Society-approved design.  Of course, many of you remember the hatch group that I watched closely this year, raised in this nest (to the right) as it looks now and pictured during their growth period (below to the left).   If you haven't seen them before, this is a pretty typical nest for a bluebird, perhaps even a little on the cushy side.  Eastern Bluebirds are not, by any anthropomorphic comparison, very good architects and they seldom place more than an inch of unorganized grass in the bottom of their boxes, varying a little upon the depth of the box cavity.

Of the other eight boxes, two were completely unoccupied and six were occupied by whatever species in my area fills the entire box, top to bottom, with small twigs (House Wren?)  The latter six boxes were all close to the border of the trees in the draw.  I had placed them along that border but facing the open prairie, thinking that the Bluebirds would like the sites, but the Bluebirds seem to be drawn to boxes out in the middle of the grasses, on fence posts.  Since Bluebirds often start nesting in early February in this area, I presume they've got first choice on most of these boxes and are leaving the boxes around the woods and ponds for others.  I think this year I will move some of the woodline boxes out farther into the fields just to make sure I've got a surplus of Bluebird-approved housing in the area.

I have to be a bit careful, however, of my site selection.  I've found that the donkey's like to rub the boxes left within their reach, often to the point of knocking them down, so I've moved several boxes to the opposite side of the fence from the donkeys or into corners where the little brown asses will have trouble getting at them.  Ding and Dong must not like Bluebirds as much as I do.

Construction Sunday

Since the unseasonably warm temperatures are holding, I spent my Sunday out on the concrete garage pad making a few more of my own North American Bluebird Society-approved bluebird boxes.  Five boxes took me 3 hours, including the time it took to haul all the saws and drills out of the basement and into the sun.  I did the work outside so I could gain the advantage of the sunlight on my retinas to also ward off any seasonal affective disorder, which I'm not really prone to, but everybody can use some extra Vitamin D in the winter.  You might say I was both holding back the blues and preparing for the blue (-birds) at the same time.

Yes, I know that the entry holes on a few of them are a little askew and there may be a crack or two in the fitting of the sides, but hey, I never claimed to be a carpenter.  Anything over changing the oil in the lawnmower or reprogramming the garage door opener tests ProfessorRoush's competencies.  And I'm paying the price today for my three hours of labor performed standing, sitting, or kneeling on concrete and waving a heavy battery-powered drill around.  When I put bone plates on dogs, I rarely need more than 10 screws.  Every birdbox here is 17 screws, predrilled and then placed.  But, whining aside, they are done and I needed them to replace a few of my older style boxes.  And soon, because them Eastern Bluebirds will begin nesting here in a few weeks.   

Bluebird Nest Boxing Day

The combination of an otherwise overcast and dreary Sunday, a warm south wind, and the sighting of a pair of Eastern Bluebirds, male and female, this morning convinced me that it was time to traipse over these grassy hills I call home and clean out my bluebird trail boxes.

Regular readers know that I try to do my part for the survival of the Eastern Bluebird and I maintain a number of boxes over 20 acres of Kansas prairie.  In fact, last year I got my own nest box design approved by the American Bluebird Society, which pleased me to no end.  Regular cleaning of the nest boxes, removing old nests and debris, is important to keep disease and overwintering insects to a minimum and thus improve the fledgling rate from the boxes.  And it must be done in the cold weather of late Fall, since the bluebirds begin nesting right after the worst of winter.

On this year's box cleaning hike, I found that 10 of 16 boxes had been occupied by nesting bluebirds, and three others looked like nests had been started but abandoned before completion.  It's easy to tell a bluebird nest from other nests, for instance from those produced by wrens, because the bluebirds build a shallow messy nest, usually of grass, as pictured at the right.  Heck, if I was starting my own nest in chilly February, as the bluebirds do here, I wouldn't be very particular about the construction either.  I have three sets of boxes out; my new box design, which had 5 nests in 6 boxes; my older box design, which is identical except for a smaller lid and which had 4 nests in 6 boxes, and 4 older NABS-type boxes, only one of which was previously occupied. 

There's always a little maintenance to do on the boxes and this year was no exception.  The older-style box pictured at the left must have had a rough year, showing signs that it was pretty singed by the Spring burn here on the prairie, but it will make it another year, I think.  I was most disturbed to find 3 boxes knocked off of the fence posts and lying on the ground.  I'd never seen that before, but at least I don't think it was due to human activity.  The pastured cattle this year were a bunch of steers who liked to rub under the boxes and I had already put one back up near the house that I had witnessed them trying to destroy.  I don't know what complaint this particular group of steers had against bluebirds but this is the only year that I've seen them single-mindedly attack the boxes. 

All in all, it was a pretty successful Bluebird year here on the prairie.  Now I just need another warm day to get busy and build a few more boxes to replace some of the older ones.  Happy Bluebird Trails to everyone!

Happy Bluebird Trails

Yes, I'm one of those wild-eyed environmental (WEE) wackos that cares to keep bluebirds from the brink of extinction, and so I annually maintain a "Bluebird Trail" for the purpose of providing proper nest areas for those beautiful creatures.  Former President Jimmy Carter may have his Habitat for Humanity thing going, but I'm much more interested in seeing the bluebirds stay on the prairie.



Eastern Bluebird in my backyard

Bluebirds are in danger of becoming the next Carolina Parakeet or Passenger Pigeon without our help. Their numbers became dangerously low in the 1970's because they are cavity nesters.  Man, in his infinite wisdom, cuts down and destroys all the dead tree stumps that would otherwise provide natural cavities for the bluebirds and they also have competition for the few remaining natural cavities from sparrows (introduced to this country in the 1850's, again as a mistake by Man because He thought sparrows would eat crop insects, not become the nuisance pests they proved to be) .

Bluebirds and I have a special relationship.  My spirits are revived each spring as they arrive to begin nesting in February.  When we were building our current home, more than once I visited the framed but not yet walled-in house to find a bluebird sitting on a windowsill, as if blessing the building of our house with his presence.  Their quick little bounces while flying always lighten my mood.  And if you've read this blog long, you know I'm a sucker for light sky blue colors in the garden in any shape or form.  I've maintained a Bluebird trail, now up to sixteen boxes, for a number of years in my small attempts to aid the bluebird comeback.  This year I fledged 6 bluebird families from the 16 boxes, with 2 more nests of other species found.  My record was 8/12 bluebird nests several years back.





 In fact, I'm so into the Bluebird Trail concept that I've done some investigation into box design and also designed my own.  I started out by purchasing some typical commercial boxes from Walmart, but along the way I've built and tried lots of others. Somewhere out there on the Internet, you can find specific designs for different forms of bluebird nestboxes, from the NABS (North American Bluebird Society) box to the Peterson box and back again. Bluebird enthusiasts can debate front- and side-opening designs, floor designs, hole shapes and diameters, and hole positions till eternity passes.  Placement and construction of the boxes is critical to draw bluebirds and repel other species.  The box should be placed in grasslands away from trees and shrubs and about 4-5 foot high.  It should be away from houses as well to deter sparrows.  Size dimensions for the nest box are critical and the hole is also carefully shaped and sized (Starlings don't use oval holes and sparrows need wider ones than the 1 3/8 X 2 1/4 inch oblong hole now recommended).  Classically, the hole is placed closer to the top of the box, but another researcher has suggested that sparrows are also deterred if the nesting cavity is shallow, with the hole nearer the bottom.  Every year you must clean out and maintain the boxes to prevent disease in early Winter, before the bluebirds return to nest in February.

I've taken the best features from research to create my own simple design, which I must say seems to be remarkably effective on my little patch of prairie. Five of the six bluebird nests I had this year were produced in the six nest boxes that I've built of my own design and the sixth box was simply empty (without a sparrow nest).  The other ten boxes of commercial and other designs had only one bluebird nest among them, but two other nests from other species. At Photobucket, you can download a jpg of the "Roush Bluebird House" construction (page 1) and a diagram of how to cut up the boards (page 2) if you click on the links.  It's cut from standard lumbar widths; cedar is best for durability. It's a similar box to the Peterson box, with a larger bottom and a lower entrance.  I find front-opening boxes to be the easiest to clean.

So please, whatever design you choose, choose to help the Eastern Bluebird. I regret that I will never be able to see a Carolina Parakeet or Ivory-billed Woodpecker and I wasn't even responsible for those extinctions.  I'd like my grandchildren to still be able to enjoy a flash of blue in their gardens.