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Safe (from Sparrows) Nesting Opportunity?

chickadeemelrose

17 years ago

I just put up my first two nestboxes, each with a wooden predator guard and a steel plate around the entrance. The boxes are in different areas of our property (about 25 feet apart) on metal poles about 6' off the ground and not near any branches or other avenues for predators to climb on or jump from. The upper third of the pole has been sprayed with WD-40. Oh, and the entrance hole is 1-1/8" in diameter. I am hoping to attract chickadees or titmice.

(We have chickadees spending time in our crabapple tree.)

Is there anything else I should do to make sure that predators (and sparrows in particular) don't get to a nest, should we be lucky enough to have one appear there?

Thanks for any opinions you might offer -

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Comments (2)

spedigrees z4VT
17 years ago
I had such a disturbing experience over the past two years with English house sparrows that I plugged up the holes on my birdhouse.

This birdhouse on a sawed off utility pole in our meadow has been home to many families of Eastern bluebirds in the past, and in some years to tree swallows. Then the house sparrows showed up, en masse.

I bought a repeating sparrow trap from this place:
http://www.sparrowtraps.net/
and I trapped and killed off most of the population. (The first year I made the mistake of relocating the sparrows to an area some 20 miles away in an effort to be humane. BIG mistake!! They have the homing abilities of pigeons.)

Anyways I significantly diminished the sparrow population but the one or two that escaped my trapping efforts still successfully drove the bluebirds from the bird house. I was so disgusted and exhausted from the unpleasant task of trying to contain the squatters that I retired from the "bird landlord" business, and my plugged up birdhouse is purely decorative now.

I wish you luck with your bird houses, but advise you to prepare for a long sustained (maybe unwinnable) war.
dzyg
17 years ago
We had Chickadees for the first time this year, they are so darn cute. A House Sparrow cannot get into a hole that is 1 1/8 inches so you should be fine. Some say though that a Chickadee won't normally build a nest in a box with that size hole however you can put a hole reducer on the box once the Chickadee has laid an egg. I have no clue what size hole a Titmouse needs, we don't have them around here. If you have House Wrens in your area though and Chickadees do show interst in the house, be prepared for them to be ousted by the wren. In our area here the Chickadee nesting season is done already, not sure what the timetable is in your area though. They only nest once per spring/summer.

Donna
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