How to Stop Birds From Building Mud Nests on My Front Porch
16 years ago
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Birds nest - complete with real birds!
Comments (6)OMG, Evelyn! If you knew how many baby mockingbirds I hand fed while working at Audubon, you'd die! People would bring in baby birds all day long, and you couldn't convince them to leave them alone, so my job was to take care of them and get them prepared to be released back into the wild later on. One of the reasons we do not encourage people "rescuing" the baby birds is that there comes a time when the bird has imprinted so strongly on the parent bird, it will not take food from a person. You can cram it down their throats, but it will just sit in the crop area and not be digested. So removing them from the parent's care is often a death sentence. Now if a whole nest comes down (like during a storm) sometimes there is no recourse but to rescue them and try to feed them. And I know techniques have improved GREATLY from the days I was involved in bird rescue. So the odds might be better now. But lordy, lordy...I must have handraised at least 200 baby mockingbirds in a couple years time. Not to mention jays, grackles, thrashers, titmice, and maybe 1,000 mourning doves! (My least favorite baby birds of all time.) Anyway, your picture is a trip down memory lane for sure. Saintp, the length of time it takes an egg to hatch varies from species to species, but usually it is not very long. A week or ten days, often. I'll see if I can find out about bluejays. I don't remember. Maybe I never even knew. But the info is probably out there somewhere. Will get back to you later. Marcia...See MoreRevisiting How to Keep Swallows From Building Nests...
Comments (114)I just stumbled upon this post as I try to prevent the recurring problems from Barn Swallows again this year. Unfortunately, the image is no longer available and I cannot see how you hung the netting. We have a colony of Barn Swallows that roost at our apartment building each year. The landlord hates them, but a former tenant had posted signs everywhere about how it was illegal to remove the nests. It was only through my own research that I realized it was only illegal while eggs or babies were in the nests, and those tenants moved out this winter. In addition to nesting on top of our buildings lights, covered walkways, and eaves, my apartment and the one next door have outdoor entrances from our gorgeous courtyard and patio which have covered stairwells. Each year, the swallows fly through these two stairwells like its the Lincoln Tunnel, dive bombing anyone who tries to walk on the stairs. They build their nests on the outlet boxes or porch lights. The first summer we lived here, I thought it was really neat to have such a close view of their lives, as I would often sit on my steps and could watch the babies as they grew, taking great care to be quiet and non-threatening. However, I also found that my porch steps and exterior wall were covered with bird droppings. They are also very very noisy when there is an entire colony of them outside of your windows. All of the "teenage" birds hang out in one of our courtyard trees outside of my window, which my cat loves but can actually drown out any conversation or television in our living room. Then I experienced what I thought were bed bugs in our house. I had tiny bites head to toe and could constantly feel them crawling on me despite rarely being able to see anything. It got so bad that I was getting the bites infected from itching all the time, and I couldn't sleep because I could feel the bugs crawling on my skin as soon as I tried to relax. I finally captured a few and took them to the University's Department of Entymology, who identified them as bird mites. That experience was HORRIFIC. I was ready to burn our entire building down after reading that the bird mites multiply much more quickly than bed bugs and are nearly impossible to remove. Luckily, the mites died off when the birds finally left for the season, but I can no longer sit outside on my wooden stairs because I fear contracting them again. The next spring, I tried the knock-down method, just on my own stairwell. I would open my screen door 2 inches and use a broom handle to knock down the nests up to 7 times a day. The swallows became very agitated, and and two attacked my daughter's head when she got home from school one of the days. I couldn't sit inside and repeat this process forever, though, and they got their nest up one day while I was off at a 12 hour work shift. The outlet covers they use are too high up to see into, and I knew that some other nests already had eggs, so I couldn't knock it down, more out of compassion than fear of charges. This will be our third summer here. Our elderly landlord has given up trying to prevent them from nesting even in the building entryways. I have removed my porch light cover so there is no solid surface to nest on, but the outlet box cover is too high up and I can't put a ladder on the stairs to reach it. I have considered trying to throw a cotton ball soaked with peppermint oil up there (it has worked in the past for mice and spider problems), or hanging a bunch of cut aluminum as a mobile at the top of the steps (I have heard that the reflections off the metal scare birds off), but I simply can't go through another year of this if those methods don't work. I saw that I could use something to create a 45% slope where the nest to prevent them, but again... getting up there is an issue. I am curious to see how you used the mesh. Could you please share the picture again?...See MoreBird built nest in my fishtail hoya! should i remove it?
Comments (43)What does mama bird think of you hovering over the nest? I'm always interested in bird behavior. Some of them will dive-bomb and get after you while others just watch. When I had a robin's nest in a Hoya, which was under our covered front porch, mama bird would fly to a close spot when we spent time on the porch. If we would sit real still, she would come back and sit on the nest, but we had to be careful not to be noisy or move around a lot. Birds are very interesting creatures! Denise in Omaha...See MoreBirds Nest in my fuschia, how to keep watering it?
Comments (8)Keep watering it, unless you are willing to let the plant die for the sake of the nest. Even then if it shrivels and drops all its leaves the concealment the bird is making use of will no longer be there anyway. If you water from the side only maybe the nest and eggs will actually float up and settle back down again each time, I don't know. Or maybe you could water more slowly, in sections, so that the nest isn't flooded....See More- 10 years ago
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