Tim, sounds like my house. I have 3 boxes. I put fishing line on a box that some HOSP had started building a nest in. I took the nesting material out and opened the box for awhile. This happened about a month ago. I closed the box and put fishing wire near the entrance hole. HOSP didn't like that and they seemed to have gone away. Today they are back building a nest, fishing wire and all. I opened the box, took out the nesting material to deter them. My blues have already started laying eggs in another box. There are 3 eggs now. . One HOSP landed on that box. The blues chased them away. Then One HOSP landed on the other box (empty box) blues chased them away from that box. I will have to keep an eye on everything. I live on a golf course. My yard is fairly large, but not too large that I can't see comings and goings. I don't have fish wire on the other two boxes. May have to put some on the box the eggs are in and see if that will work. Hope it won't disturb the blues too much.

It traps them in the box which is why if you use a vanert you need to keep checking often to see if it sprung because if you trap a native bird you want to let it go as soon as you can. HOw it works is there is a bar that the flap rests against, when the bird goes inside and lands on this bar, the flap flips up and shuts the hole of the box so it cannot get out. What you do is have a large clear (strong) garbage bag or mesh laundry bag over the top of the entire house, holding it closed at the pole. Open the nestbox and let the bird inside fly out into the bag. If it is a HOSP..you can then dispose of it. If it is another bird you can let it go. I have two van erts and they have caught may HOSP for me...they have also caught a Bluebird, TRES, wrens and even a Downey woodpecker! Donna

Where you live sounds like mine :) out in the country, corn fields and horses down the road, and very windy all the time. I have no problems with my spookers. I always have them up! I had no idea about hosp. until I checked my TRES. box(6 years ago) and the hosp killed the female sitting on her 4 eggs and he proceeded to make his nest on top of her. This year a hosp killed my male bb. it was still winter and still very cold and no one was going in and out of the box. One day I saw a hosp. sitting on top of the box and I thought I better get the trap on and get rid of him now. To my horror, there was a dead male bb. Needless to say, it doesn't bother me any more to "get rid" of the hosp. I never even saw a bb around. There was still snow on the ground...who would have thought those nasty birds would kill in the winter too.

Call it beginners' luck. I was able to adjust a Beckett gun by eye. My Crown furnace has a decent sight glass - probably mica - so the flame's easy to see. I simply closed the air shutter until I saw some smoke, then opened it back a bit 'til it went away. If the furnace used a trap door to view the flame, I would not have been able to do this. That's because closing the door would change the airflow - and adjustments made with the door open would change, as well. A good calibrated barometric damper was used in the flue. It was easy to set draft to the 0.02 WC recommended by Crown. I just lined up the weight to the .02 mark. Yes...Crown recommends also that draft should be taken from the overfire port for better accuracy. However, I had no instrument to do this. Even though the furnace appeared to run well after my initial "adjustments" I had still three good reasons to hire a pro to finish the job... - peace of mind - Crown warranty - the local building inspector said so A licensed tech came in a few days later to inspect my work and make any adjustments. Oil pressure was right on (I'm sure the factory took care of that, so no surprise). What did surprise me, however, was that both air shutter and draft were "very close" to what they should be. He mentioned also that the install itself was very "neat". When I told him it took me four weekends to do it all, he laughed and told me to keep my day job as an engineer. Funny...I never told him what I did for a living. Peace. Marco