Choosing the correct bird house
Filed Under buy bird house |
Most people get all excited when choosing bird houses at the pet store. Now who won’t ? The cute bird houses comes in all sorts of shapes, colors and sizes. Sometimes they also come with different designs on them especially some designer bird house and custom bird houses. Some of them are opaque bird houses while others are variants of the see-through bird house.Faced with so many choices, do you sometimes get carried away and have no idea which one you will choose ?
The question you should be asking yourself at that point of time is “What bird do I want to attract ?”. Whether you are choosing a colorful bird house, or a see-through bird house, The bird house choices should be determined primarily from what kind of birds do you want in your bird house. For example, blue birds, swallows, wrens and other small birds are attracted to bird houses with smaller entrance openings. Your bird house plan should include an optimal size for an entrance opening to be about 1.25 inch to 1.5 inch which allows for the birds to enter your bird house while keeping larger prey away. A bird house should be a safe place for the birds that you want to be nesting inside. This is one good way to attract potential birds to visit the bird house. However, it is still not a fool-proof plan to protect the bird house because it does not exclude pest birds from entering the bird house too.
For this post, we are going to talk about the selection of the bird house construction material inside when you buy a bird house. The best bird houses are made from natural materials such as wood, an example of this will be wooden bird houses which can be easily found from any pet store. In recent years, some enterprising bird houses companies has turned to making bird houses from metal. Although a metal bird house could be nice and shiny, it could potentially be a oven for your nesting birds under the sun ! Can you imagine yourself going into a car that is parked under a sunny hot day and closing all the windows and doors ? It is NOT A GOOD FEELING ! Similarly, metal bird houses can add to the internal temperature and may cause serious over-heating inside your bird house.
Another reason to select a wooden bird house is that since wood is textured and does not have a uniform smooth surface like metal, it is easier for birds to cling to because their claws can grab onto the uneven and rough texture of the bird house which helps the baby bird to come out from your bird house. This is an important point because some baby birds who do not have a strong ability to fly yet may get trapped and die inside the bird house because they cannot get out.
Second, please also choose a bird house material that does not absorb too much moisture. As posted earlier in the Checklist Before You Buy Bird Houses entry, you should have drainage holes in the bird house that help to get rid of extra water in the bird house. This is to prevent fungus, mold and diseases of growing inside your bird house. This is also an important point to prevent your bird house from filling up with water and accidental drowning of the occupants inside your bird house !
Finally, the material of your bird house should not contain too much paint. As you know, you are going to leave the bird house outside in your garden. When paint is exposed to the sun and the rain for a extended period of time, they start to flake and peel. While choosing a colorful bird house will make it very attractive and make it a unique bird house for your garden, the flaking paint may be ingested by the birds in your bird house thus poisoning the birds inside. So be sure not to choose a bird house that is painted on the inside because there is a high chance the paint will be swallowed by some young baby birds since they cannot tell the different between something poisonous and something that is not.
Comments
Leave a Reply
