Bird Housing: Your Shop Teacher Got it Wrong

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Birds, of course, will nest almost anywhere, in anything, when the mating pressure is on and competition for housing is hot. So you can't go by their responses to our silliness. Birds will use whatever fits, and many man-made birdhouses fit very well. That's not the problem. The problem is that we make such fools of ourselves.

We go about it all wrong.

IN sixth-grade shop class we were taught that six pieces of wood, with a hole in one of them, could be assembled to create a perfect birdhouse. The teacher said so; it had to be true. Our parents marveled at our ingenuity, thereby confirming what the teacher had said. We marveled at it, too. Then we hung our masterpieces out-of-doors and, sure enough, birds nested in them, reconfirming everything. How much more perfect could six pieces of wood possibly get?

Much more. We are now entering a new age of environmental awareness.

No longer do we see smoke belching chimneys as signs of economic well-being. No longer do we see harbors as the places to dump sewage, or chemicals as the way to better living. We're slowly coming to realize that it is we who have polluted and poisoned and eroded our earthly home, we who have wiped out thousands of species, we whose very houses are environmental horrors, wasting resources and destroying land.

OUR awakening is leading us to take a closer look at creatures we once thought of only as sources of food, fur, feathers or song. We're beginning to discover what miracles share the land with us, and that discovery is changing the way we see not only human architecture but the architecture we offer the birds as well.

We can never match the structures the birds themselves create. Try to imagine weaving a delicate basket of twigs and grasses in just a few days, with no previous experience, no practice, no tools and no bands!

The best we can ever hope to do is build bridges from the man-made to the wild. Even then, we are likely to fall. At best, we can only partly succeed. But we owe it to the creator of the birds, if not to the birds themselves, to give it our very best shot; to say, somehow, in human terms, what they say so movingly in grass and twigs and straw.

Construction

If you use "found objects" instead of premium lumber for your birdhouse, sizes will differ somewhat from those shown here. That doesn't matter. You can juggle the dimensions to suit the materials at hand, and to please your own eye for elegance and proportion.

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