How to Build a Birdhouse
Building a birdhouse can be an excellent way of spending family time together. You and your family can make a birdhouse to put in your backyard. Soon, you will all hear happy and excited chirpings throughout the day. It can be also be a good way to spend a quiet Sunday at home. Although you may love to paint birdhouses in bright colors, birds prefer unpainted, roughly finished birdhouses that are more like their natural nests.
You can add any number of innovations and styles into your birdhouse. However, birds do not care for any particular style. Each species of birds have specific requirements for their houses. Therefore, you should make birdhouses for the particular species of birds that you want to attract to your birdhouse.
Preferences of Your Winged Friends
The best choice for building a birdhouse is wood, especially cypress and cedar. You can also use pine, although it is more expensive. Birds prefer wooden houses to aluminum or plastic as it resembles their natural homes.
Do not paint or treat the insides of the birdhouses with any chemicals. They may let out harmful fumes, which may be especially dangerous to your feathered friends and their young. Similarly, unfinished interiors help the young birds to clamber out more easily.
Provide sufficient protection from predators like squirrels and cats. Mount the birdhouse at the top of a pole about six feet off the ground so that cats cannot leap on to it. Also, apply slippery substances like petroleum jelly or hot pepper spray to prevent cats from scampering up the pole.
If you keep many birdhouses, keep them at safe distances from each other. Birds have specific territorial rights and do not like to have others of their kind too close by.
Keep the entrance hole away from the direction of the prevailing wind, to provide protection for the birds from strong winds.
Make a few holes small in the back wall and the top to allow good ventilation. Similarly, make sloped roofs to allow rainwater to drain off. Make some small holes in the floor to let waste water to flow out.
Consider using a baffle to protect your birds. A baffle is a guard to keep predators away. Some are cone-shaped so that a raccoon cannot get their little paws into the nest and snatch a baby bird or an egg.
