I live in a suburban type neighborhood but with houses on only one side of the street. Accross the street from me is a big (16 acre) open park and directly next to the park is another heavily wooded area which is a county nature preserve. My neighbors have the typical no garden landscape but here I have planted heavily in fruiting shrubs like viburnum, serviceberry, shrub dogwoods, Winterberry, blueberries, and many others that attract backyard songbirds. I have no bluebirds and no tree sparrows have ever come to my nestboxes although I do see them flying overhead. Although I have had the male wren building fake nests for 4 years, last year was the first year he found a mate and they fledged two broods. That year the chicadees were nesting less than 20 feet away from the wrens. They never bothered each other. This year the wren is nesting in the front yard in a slotbox house that is very near my blackberries. The chicadees are in the backyard in a box very near my old cherry tree. The nestboxes are not in sight of each other but really they are not that far from each other either as I do not have a huge yard. House wrens apprear to be rare here. It was years of me planting shrubs to make the yard more attractive to sonbirds before I ever saw a wren here. I know that this is not a polular opinion here on the bluebird forum but I really like the house wrens.

I have had many house wrens occupy gourds and houses swinging free in the trees.

I am just guessing here but they may have fledged- a few questions here- how did they look in appearance? Were they all covered in feathers that look like they may be able to climb/hop onto shrubs for cover? Or were they very small and helpless looking? The noise you heard was probably them responding to the parents' calls to leave the nest. (Parents usually do that from a distance to get them to leave the nest.)I'm thinking that they're long gone with the parents. Fledglings usually leave the nest/area as quickly as possible and find cover elsewhere where the parents feed them until they're able to fend for themselves. Hope this helps. Nerry

It was nice of the landlord to remove the old nesting material (chickadee style) so the wren could bring in better material (wren style). It's not easy getting large twigs through that hole though - a little like trying to wrestle large furniture up the stairs into a house. I'm looking forward to seeing a wren family. I hope that jay isn't a problem. It looks too big to be much of a danger. Claire