One other visitor publish from Tom as we speak…

Having chickens and compost in our suburban setting has put us right into a scenario the place we’re warding off varmints – particularly, rats. I’ve written about our rat trapping efforts earlier than (see The RRZ and RRZ Half Two), and our rat scenario is fairly cyclic – we begin noticing proof of them, I get slightly extra diligent about establishing the traps, we entice a couple of, after which the trapping slows down and we don’t see as a lot of them once more.

We’ve received a wide range of hawks and owls within the neighborhood, and whereas we’ve not essentially seen them making off with any rats, we determine that they’re additionally serving to to maintain the rat inhabitants in test (one of many causes we’ve caught with snapping traps and never poison). I’m unsure the place we heard this, however the phrase “you don’t have a rat drawback, you’ve received an owl deficiency” has been in our heads, and so this winter I did some analysis into nesting containers for owls.

You could find chicken field plans everywhere in the web. My most trusted supply of all issues chicken is the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. They’ve received a particular web site, Nestwatch, that has directions and plans for chicken containers for all types of species of birds. The knowledge is great – along with plans, they’ve received recommendation on how excessive as much as put a field, which course to face it, whether or not a particular chicken goes to nest in your space of the nation (and when), and so forth. (Observe: downloading particular plans requires you to enter an electronic mail tackle, which I all the time discover slightly regarding (please no newsletters!), nevertheless it’s been okay).

After fairly a little bit of trying and pondering and perseverating, I made a decision to begin off small, making a few containers for among the smaller birds that frequent our yard. The Nestwatch web site has a single plan for a sequence of smaller birds we see – Bewick’s wrens, nuthatches, chickadees, and the oak titmouse – with the one actual distinction being the scale of the outlet within the entrance. I discovered that I might make the entire field from a single piece of straightforward 5-foot 1”x6” cedar fence board. No actual particular instruments required – I used a round noticed to make all of the cuts, together with the few angled ones. Whole value was possibly $10-20, and a few hours of effort. I feel they turned out good: