I look at life a bit differently, and like to post my weird thoughts. I like musicial instrument repair and woodworking. For trying to live a somewhat normal life, a lot of weird things happen to me. Instead of putting up with it, I post about it in this blog.
A year and a half ago I put up a number of birdhouses around the property. I've actually written quite a few blog posts about them. I was really proud of the work I completed. Not only did I customize them with "Squirrel Guards," I also made sure there were drainage holes for water.
And to absolutely make sure they would last, I painted them with enamel paint. Next, I used enamel spray paint so the birdhouses would match the colors of an oak tree. Honestly, I went all out for those houses.
So it made me pretty angry when I found the roof tore off of one. Well I decided to do something about it. I was going to make a new roof, but when I went to take the birdhouse down, I found the roof sitting inside the house.
Then, a Cuban Tree Frog jumped up out of the house, hitting me in face, causing me to fall off my ladder. I really hurt my left toe falling. But after I felt a little better, I took the birdhouse to my workshop. I made sure to take lots of photos of the repair. I'll explain my work as I show the photos.
So here's the birdhouse and roof on my bench.
It's not in that bad a shape. The wood was a little warped, but other than that it's alright. Let's take a peek inside to see if there's anything wrong with it.
No, it's just a little dirt. I decided to use some "helping hands" in the form of clamps. They held the top on while I nailed the roof down.
I found these awesome tiny white finish nails in one of Dad's parts buckets. They were perfect for this job.
And here she is, as good as new.
Now it was time to put the birdhouse back on the pole.
Now that I've fixed the birdhouse I'm hoping to have a pair of birds nest in it this spring. If not, I'm sure the Cuban Tree Frogs will hang out in there. They will bide their time until I walk by, jumping with all their might, smacking me right on the forehead.
Back in March I wrote a blog post about building and putting up new birdhouses. We have so many birds around here it made sense to have plenty of birdhouses for them. Here's the post:
Like any woodworker/artist/bird enthusiast I take pride in my work. This what the birdhouse looked like after I hung it up back in March.
I was taking a stroll past the birdhouse the other day, and became infuriated. I looked at my birdhouse, and thought, "What am I looking at?"
So I took a closer look.
Closer....
Okay, now I'm mad. I'm more than mad. What you are looking at is the birdhouse's squirrel guard. Something had destroyed the guard to enlarge the hole. The reason I put the guard there was because squirrels like to climb into the birdhouses and eat the eggs or young chicks.
Right now, here are the suspects.
First up, a squirrel or squirrels.
I suspect this monstrosity was chipping away at the birdhouse to get to baby chicks. They are a malevolent bunch.
Suspect #2: Idiot woodpecker.
Okay, it's technically this is called a pileated woodpecker. But they like going around putting holes in things. Although it's really working against it's fellow birds' self interests by enlarging the squirrel guards. We have dozens of trees around the property. Why did this redheaded asshole decide to destroy my birdhouse?
So that's my story so far. If the hole gets worse I may end up replacing the squirrel guard. If it gets even worse than that, I will just replace the whole birdhouse. The backyard should be on alert. I'm keeping an eye on all the birdhouses. Nature should know I'm not above employing underhanded techniques to protect my birdhouses.
As I posted in the previous blog post, springtime is in full effect. A pair of Carolina Wrens' spent a few weeks building a nest on the porch. Then, surprise! They laid eggs. It has been ten days since my first post and a few things have happened.
First up, the female Wren laid two more eggs.
She ended up laying one egg per day for four days. Now comes the hard part for her, sitting on the nest. This presents a problem. When I walk out on the porch she doesn't want to move off the nest, but if she sees me looking at her, she takes off flying.
She's about taken my head off a few times. So I have to "Use the force," and walk quickly by the nest without looking at her. If I take my time, or look her in the eyes, she comes flying straight up my nose. I'm not kidding. One time she came pretty close to picking my nose as she flew by.
I can't blame her that time. It was early morning and the sun hadn't come up. I was standing by the nest, and looked in her direction. Since it was dark, I couldn't see her, but she saw me. That's when she panicked, and zoomed by me. I'll admit, I did not take it well. I hadn't been scared like that in a long time. But again, that one was on me.
The incubation period for Carolina Wrens' is 14-17 days. I'm not sure if that's from the day the first egg was laid or not. Since it's so warm down here in Florida I'm going to guess the incubation period is going to be closer to 14 days. So in about 3-4 days I'm going to start looking for baby chicks. But I'm going to do it extremely carefully. I might also use a shield. We'll see.
Recently I have posted quite a number of blog posts about my birdhouses. Having birdhouses and bird feeders brings quite a large number of birds around the house. Yesterday I discovered one of the weird side effects of having birds hanging around.
The bird feeder has the usual kinds of wild bird seed in it. But the ones the birds and squirrels love the most is the sunflower seed. In a "Damn nature! You scary!" kind of way something pretty funny happened. It seems one of the birds dropped a sunflower seed in the rain gutter. Well, if a tree can grow in Brooklyn, then a sunflower can grow in my rain gutter.
And even though I am posting this on April 1st, I assure you this is not an April Fool's Day joke.
Here's a wide shot of the sunflower.
I actually noticed it when I was looking at the roof. The reason I was looking at the roof is because all the pollen has piled up there. I knew I was eventually going to have to go up there with the blower, and clear everything off the roof and clean the gutters.
I do need to clean the gutters, but I'm really having a hard time determining how clean I want it. I don't want to get rid of the sunflower, but I really need that gutter clear. We do get a lot of rain here in Florida, and it pays to keep the gutters clear. I've got time to decide what to do. After all, it's raining out there now.
It's that time of year again. The time of year the birds are in love. That's right. Springtime brings out the best of the birds and the bunnies. As I have posted before, I have an old birdhouse that I put on the corner of the property.
Over the years I have mostly had Tufted Titmouse pairs take up residence in the spring. Yes a Tufted Titmouse is a real bird for all of you laughing like Beavis.
One year I had a pair of Red Cardinals move in and lay eggs. I was glad to see them, but by the time I noticed they had moved in, their chicks were grown. Three days later they moved out.
I have to say my old birdhouse has held together over the years. What's funny, is that, it's actually a parakeet house I bought from Pet Supermarket years ago. I used oil enamel paint to seal the wood so it would protected in our Florida environment.
So this year the family was wondering if anyone would move in. Also, if they did, who would move in? Well, about a week ago we got our answer. And like they say on the internet, "Pics or it didn't happen!" So here's who moved in.
It seems like they are digging the new digs. But will they lay eggs? Let me answer that with another picture.
One egg, blue egg? Am I Doctor Seuss? Wait, there's more?
A few days later another egg appeared. So let's check in a few days after that.
So now it's one egg, two egg, three egg, blue egg?
But really it was interesting to see how they went about nesting. First, they removed all of the old nest. Then, they built a completely new nest. After that, they started laying an egg every other day. The nest hasn't been checked in a few days so there might be a few more eggs waiting.
Bluebirds will lay anywhere from three to eight eggs, but can have more than one brood during the spring. So we might have another brood of eggs laid after this one.
Here are some more fun photos of the bluebirds.
The following are my previous blog posts about my birdhouses.
Oh, and if you sang the title of this blog post to the Broadway play, "The Producers," you win. For those who don't know what I'm talking about watch this.
So when we last left off we had six eggs in the birdhouse. The good news, is that, all six of them hatched!
Say, does that one look like it's saying, "I'm naked, but feed me anyway?"
But they wouldn't stay naked for long. Just a week later all six had feathers, and were still doing fine.
The chickadee on the upper left decided it was getting a bit crowded in the nest. Besides, he was a little too big at this point.
Just a few days after that a few of the others had gotten so big they needed a bit more room.
The good news was that all six chicks were still doing well.
A few days after that it looked like all their feathers had grown in.
Again, all six were there. But do you know that 15-18 days after hatching the chicks leave the nest? Yes, they are ready to fly out onto the world. So this is the last photo I have of them.
I'm glad to see all six made it this far. As a former pet shop employee I've seen the odds that baby anything have to overcome to reach adulthood. It ain't pretty.
I'm glad to see my little birdhouse made a little bit of a difference. Things actually went according to plan. I put the box up in the fall so it could be used in the spring. Let's see if another family of birds will move in sometime. If they do, you can be sure I will be there to blog about it.
So now it's time to play the "Success in Birding" song.
So I've had my birdhouse up for about four months now. My plan back then was to make sure the birdhouse was up a few months before spring. Spring, of course, being the time the birds will nest, and lay eggs.
My sister, who is the gardener, was the one to actually notice a pair of birds had moved in. They were, in fact, a pair of Carolina Chickadees. Here is a photo of the birdhouse I put up.
Here's a photo that my sister took of the inside of the nest.
And here are two video clips of the Carolina Chickadee screaming at my sister.
Apparently it didn't like her near it's new house. So a screaming match ensued. The chickadee may have won the screaming match part, but my sister still managed to take some great photos.
And here is a great photo my sister took of the Chickadee with nesting material in its beak.
So it seems like my plan worked. I now have some tenets in my birdhouse, and they are busy nesting. I'm glad I decided to take down the old, unused feeder, and put up the birdhouse. So to celebrate, here's the song.
A long time ago in a backyard far away.... I put up a bird feeder. It was really successful. As in, the birds were eating one pound of birdseed a day. In other words, one 20 lbs. bag of birdseed wouldn't last a month. Sometimes it would barely make it to two weeks.
This lead to problems. Namely, the squirrels started to take over. They would toss all the bird food on the ground except the sunflower seeds, which they would eat. But they wouldn't let the birds have any of the birdseed. So I did what any angry American would do. I started shooting the squirrels out of the bird feeder.
This lead to more problems, as in, what is the legality of firing a 12 gauge shotgun within the city limits of Lutz? After I'd shot the tenth squirrel it really dawned on me that they were coming as fast as I could shoot them. Also, thanks to all the practice I had out duck hunting, I'm a pretty good shot.
Now for those who would say that I killed those furry rats for nothing, know this. I took them over to the bottom of the tree where the hawks had their nest. That way, the didn't go to waste. And the hawks had some nice squirrel to feed their baby hawks. And for those who think I'm having a bit of fun by saying a mated pair of hawks lived in a tree just off our backyard, well, take a glance at this.
In this next picture you can actually see my birdfeeder, and the hawk flying right by it. They did their best at keeping the squirrels honest. The birdfeeder is in the lower left of the photo, and the hawk is the giant blur in the middle.
In this photo you can see the hawk giving me the, "What are you looking at chowderhead? look." I know it looks like I am far away in this picture, but remember when I took my camera was not near as nice as the ones they have now. Yeah, my camera took floppy disks. I'm not making that up. So the quality of this photo is not great, but the hawk is actually pretty close to me.
Back to the birdhouses. During this same time I bought and painted a few birdhouses. When one would rot and fall apart, I would buy, paint, and hang up another. I had the birdhouses hanging from a limb in one of the oak trees. I've had a number of birdhouses, and as far as I know, I've had four families of birds live in them over the years.
I just learned not long ago that the proper name for these small birds is a "Tufted Titmouse. (I'm not making that up.) One time I had a pair of red cardinals raise a family in one of the houses. That was really neat. What I thought was weird was that, they only stayed for about three weeks, and then everyone was gone. The babies had grown up, and moved on.
So due to the cost of the seed, and multiple problems with squirrels I gave up putting bird food in the bird feeder. I also gave up hanging my last birdhouse since it kept falling down. I wasn't sure if it was the rubber string dry-rotting or the squirrels chewing on it.
So the other day I was looking at my old birdhouse. It was still in good shape. I decided to do something about it. I decided to hang it ... somewhere. That's when I looked over to where my birdfeeder still was. "Well, that could be an easy solution," I thought. I'd just take off the birdfeeder and put up the birdhouse in it's place. Way back when, I intentionally put the feeder on a metal galvanized pole to keep the squirrels at bay. It was somewhat successful doing that. So I figured it would be a good spot to hang the new/old birdhouse.
Here's the birdhouse.
As you can see I painted it a dull green/gray so it would blend in with the oak tree. Here's a picture taken from a bit further away.
I realize that birdhouses are supposed to be up a little before springtime, so that either makes me half a year late or about half a year early. Either way, I hope that some birds find it as a nice little place to live. I hope it will be birds and not wasps. They have a way of getting into everything down here.
If anything moves in you can be sure I that will take pictures and write a blog post about it. And if any squirrels come near it... Well, I can't talk about that. Also, that was a car backfiring. Or fireworks. Or something.
If you didn't understand the pop culture reference in the title, give this a listen. Also, you may contract an earworm. Be warned.
