Saturday, July 25, 2015

First Tenents!

I'm kinda excited as we noticed a couple of Carolina Wrens investigating a new style birdhouse we put up on the porch.  This morning we noticed a piece of grass/straw hanging out of the house!

 You may remember the wren house we put up a week or so ago - well, even though the wrens still kept trying to build a nest in the ceiling fan (see photo on the left), they totally ignored the house my DH built.  I did a bit more research and found that the wrens don't like houses with small entry holes even though larger birds can't enter to take over the nest or destroy the wren eggs.

So my husband built another house and made the entry hole really large, almost 3" in diameter!  This house design is very unique and easy to build as the body of it is actually an old metal coffee can!  That's the house we have hanging up now.

The larger hole did the trick and we now have a pair of wrens building a nest in the new house!  The next step will be to enlarge the entry hole in the other bird house he built and see if we can attract another pair.

You can see both the unique design of the house as well as the over-sized piece of grass sticking out of the entry hole in the photo below.  Click on either photo to get an enlarged view.



Unfortunately, the entry hole faces out into the back yard and I probably won't be able to get photos of the nest or babies because the porch is fairly high off the ground and because of the angle needed to photograph it.  Maybe I can find a tall enough step ladder to put me on level with the birdhouse and use the zoom lens to get photos - we'll see what I can do.

This is sort of anti-climatic but I did finish the Cecropia Moth painting or at least I'm pretty sure it's finished.  It's a painting I even like for a change too - well, mostly like - there are always things that could be improved!  Will post a photo once the shine dries enough not to get glare.

2 comments:

Sue Clinker said...

So pleased you have house guests! Your porch looks very inviting, I can imagine sitting on the swing with a glass of cold white wine to hand LOL

Jan said...

We're very pleased with our guests also - the little Carolina Wrens are so perky and happy sounding with their song early in the morning! But they're very elusive and we often hear them but when we look for them, we can't see them.

The porch is great but only really useful in the spring and fall except for very early mornings in the summer but then it's coffee and not white wine, unfortunately!!!