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Monday, May 07, 2007

In the Driver's Seat


The photo above is of a House Wren who nested in our friend's weathervane. He made the weathervane shaped like a tractor and installed in on his lawn in front of his house. The wren thought this was just a perfect place to nest, and would comically land on the tractor seat before going into the nest.

Today our first House Wren showed up. This is always a mixed blessing. Love the bubbly wren song, which fills the garden. However, all heck breaks loose with our resident birds who nest in our bird houses, since wrens love to claim many bird houses and stuff them with sticks. So there's squabbling over houses, the residents defending their nests from the wrens.

One way we deal with this is to put out some extra bird houses close together in our garden when the wren arrives, to keep him busy. Male wrens make "dummy nests" of twigs in several bird houses before the female arrives, sometimes stuffing them so full, you wonder how he can get into the box. She then chooses one and adds a lining and that becomes the place they raise their family. So today was a mixed blessing.

Photos © Lillian Stokes, 2007

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Will you fix the pictures so they show please?

Lillian Stokes said...

Blogger ate my photos of the wren last night. I put them up and they were showing yesterday, then they disappeared. So I just reloaded them up to Blogger and hopefully they will stay there.
Wrens can be cute, he was singing away in the garden this morning.
Lillian

Anonymous said...

LOL, glad you got these shots fixed! I missed them the first time around and way too cute to have not seen!