Bird Housing: Your Shop Teacher Got it Wrong

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Even after having built more birdhouses than I can count, I still fiddle with the proportions as I go along, sometimes straying considerably from the dimensions I'd worked out earlier. Maybe one aspect of the design needs more emphasis. Maybe the setting demands a longer, shorter, thinner or bolder form. Maybe the height of the viewer's location makes revisions necessary; things look quite different when seen from above (or below) as opposed to straight on. The only thing to remember is that the design that follows will probably not be helped by a lot of arbitrary changes. It's been pretty thoroughly worked out by trial and error over the years, to the point that it now seems to be just about as appealing and graceful to most people as it can be, given the physical limitations set by the birds themselves.

Materials

You shouldn't have to pay for any materials but the nails. If birds can scrounge all the materials they need, surely we can, too.

Just look for mostly thin (1/2", 3/4" and 1''), weathered boards of various lengths and poles or small tree trunks to use as mounting posts. Try to find pieces with interesting grains. Here's your chance to use all those warped, split, beautiful rejects you've been waiting to turn into something.

But make sure the materials you collect don't smell of paint or poisons. The materials birds themselves build with eventually rot and become wildflowers or trees again. When we introduce deadly, soulless materials such as plastics, paint or preservatives into the lifestreams of these beautiful creatures, we endanger not only them but ourselves as well.

The First Earth-Sheltered Birdhouse

WHEN I initially decided to design an underground birdhouse I thought, naturally, of a conventional one set beneath the ground. But then someone pointed out to me the fact that birds are more sky oriented than earthbound. Once I accepted that revelation, the current birdhouse design began to take form in my mind. I saw it as a high nesting shelf protected by a widely overhanging profusion of wildflowers, the roof having a dome-shaped contour.

But after testing such an arrangement during the great summer drought of '88, 1 soon discovered that only a high mound of waterholding mulch would keep the plants alive and the birds comfortable. Obviously, the success of the design depends on its waterholding capacity, and that capacity is based on natural principles we've only now begun to rediscover as we move into the era of limited water supplies. Mulch, topsoil, compost, roots, shade and a reservoir combine to carry the process along from rainstorm to rainstorm.

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