
Part of my Roundrock Land Ethic (remember my Roundrock Land Ethic?) is to foster habitat for the kinds of wild things that lived in my part of Missouri before I and humans like me came along. The house you see above is a recent effort to honor my ethic.
Of course a place like my forest, with plenty of standing dead timber, is full of opportunities for cavity nesters, but even so, I’m happy to give them one more potential nest. This nest box serves a couple of other functions as well though.
The box is made of recycled plastic. That gives me some warm fuzzies, though I hope that bluebirds will tolerate this artificial material over natural wood. We should be finding out soon since nesting season will begin in a couple of months, and a successful mating pair can bring off up to three broods in a year if circumstances are good.
I chose carefully where I wanted to place this house; unfortunately, I didn’t get to put it where I had intended. My southern property line is a half mile long. I have two neighbors to the south. One of them, along the half of that line that is fenced, has been doing a lot of work clearing the avenue that runs along the fence. He hardly ever drives along, though I did see a pickup go hurrying over the rough ground once, and there have been a few times when we’ve seen fresh tire tracks in the tall grass. Nonetheless, it’s his open access area, and he can do with it whatever he wants. Also nonetheless, I want to let him know I am paying attention, and one of the ways to do that is to show that I am doing work along there as well. I have cut conspicuous branches from trees on my side of the fence that hang over on his side of the fence. The fresh saw marks on the trees are visible to all who pass, and since there are plenty of these kinds of branches, I can leave fresh signs of my vigilance every time I pass.
Another idea I had was to hang a new birdhouse on one of the fence posts along the open avenue so anyone passing couldn’t miss it. There are several open spots along the fence that would work perfectly, and with that plan in mind, Libby and I (and Queequeg and Flike) headed out from the Cabin at the End of the Road on our last trip to Roundrock with all of the equipment we needed to set this plan in motion.
Here is the back of the birdhouse. You can see that I added a couple of U-bolts to be the fastener:

When I was at the hardware store buying these, I carried them over to the area (at the absolute opposite end of the big box store) where the fence posts were. I oh-so-sensibly slipped them over a post to ensure I had the right size. They worked just fine. There were only two flaws in my clever plan.
The first was that I failed to take into account the curve of the bolt. Because of its shape, some of its length is kept inside the box. I realized this once I was home, late the evening before we were to make our trip to the woods. To compensate, I drilled the holes in the back of the box at angles, thus allowing some of the curve of the U to be inside the wall rather than all the way inside the box.
The second flaw in my plan was that the posts that hold the fence along half of my southern property line are just slightly wider than the ones now sold at the hardware store. This, of course, we didn’t discover until we were deep in the forest and at the fence. Muscle it as I might, I could not make the bolts fit. Not with a birdhouse still attached.
Thus my plan of putting the house in a place where my busy neighbor to the south can see it was thwarted. (Yes, of course I could have returned to the hardware store after returning to suburbia, or even in the small town near our woods, to get longer bolts, but we were already in the forest and I was determined to hang the house.)
As I said above, only half of my southern property line is fenced. The other rambles over hill and valley through the trackless forest. However, in a past effort to show good faith at where I approximate the line to run, I have slammed a couple dozen posts in the ground, and I knew that a couple of these were in relatively open areas that I understand bluebirds favor for their nesting sites.
And so Libby and I (and Queequeg and Flike) continued our march along the southern line to find one of these slimmer posts. The one we used is fairly close to the Old Man of the Forest, which is a lovely bit of the forest that I don’t mind having another reason to visit more frequently. It’s not as open as I’d like, but my new handsaw and I can work to correct that.
And the best part of this whole adventure is that I could still get myself another birdhouse and longer U bolts and then hang it where I had intended originally.
Missouri calendar:
- Danger — spring fire season begins if there is no snow and lasts until the greening of spring.