Thank you! I'm saving this info so I can do this sometime in the Spring, whenever the weather decides to warm up :) !! pkponder ...do you have a picture? Would love to see it. I want to include a Birdhouse and a Birdfeeder. My Birdfeeder is very large and I hung it last summer and was still out till recently when it needed seed and found out the thing broke at the top where you take it off to add seed ... so I'm mounting it on a pole and it will be just fine that way. It is VERY heavy so I can't have a tall pole for it. I included a picture of my bird feeder. It is 13 x 13 and has 9 feeding stations, 11lb capacity. I want to have a birdhouse separate but not too far away. Have an idea to put these alongside our ramp ... will look nice with some vines I think. :) Also, I know this bird feeder can be pole mounted because a couple people told me about how to do it. I saved that info and it says The pipe needs to be no wider than 7/8 of an inch. Anyway, looking forward to mounting that and I have to find a nice bird house to also mount on a pole. We have lots of cats around here (including ours that goes outside) and squirrels, so I might have to figure a way to keep them out.

Debbie, you will know better the next time, so try not to feel too bad. Just about everyone here got into this not really knowing how involved it would become. As Jane said, some of us have learned the hard way and try to help others from making the same mistakes. I still feel bad about my first ever nest of bluebirds. I lost 9 day old babies to a raccoon -- every bluebird box I had ever seen was on a wood post, so that was what I put mine on. The owner of my local bird store even told me to do it that way! It was an awful lesson for me - I learned the hard way that raccoons can climb a wood post as easily as we walk on a sidewalk. Then I learned about poles and baffles and there have been no more raccoon losses. We probably all have failure stories to share. Let us know how the new nesting goes. Good luck ~ Malinda

It may be intended to be a butterfly "house". The little I have read about butterfly houses indicates that they don't work very well, though. https://www.pinterest.com/explore/butterfly-house/?lp=true

Get some Terro ant baits from the big box stores and follow the instructions. It will wipe out the colony in a week or two.