Moving Day for Baby Wrens

It has been a very long time since I last posted here.  We have been busy.  Our time has been filled with mostly routine day to day activities such as lots of walking, but it has also included some not so routine activities such as replacing the house air conditioner...twice. 

We are getting ready for our next big project...a total redo of Backyard World.  Since we are farming that out to the professionals this time, hopefully it won't take a thousand weekends.  In any case, I definitely want to capture that project on GoPro.   Before I do that, I realized I needed to save and process the video that was on the GoPro memory card.  Of course, since it had been so long, I had to relearn how to do everything again, saving and processing the video, working with the blog, etc. etc.  Here goes what feels like starting all over again, so bear with me. 

The First Family.  Back in the early spring we had the excitement of a family of Carolina wrens in the bird house outside of our bathroom window.  It was great fun to see them carry sticks into the house to make their nest, then ferry meal worms back and forth from the feeder in the backyard to the nest.  We did not see the baby birds after they left the nest, but heard the entire family in the trees in the front yard.  We also assumed they were among the wrens that occasionally visited the feeders in the backyard later in the summer.

We did not know whether any of these birds would return to the birdhouse, so we initially left it alone.  However, after seeing no activity for several weeks, we opened it up and cleaned it out. 

Wren nest inside the house after the birds had left.

The nest is small, but completely fills the house although stays several inches below the opening.  As a point of reference for scale, the diameter of the round opening is 1.25 inches.  It is big enough for the wrens but not big enough for the sparrows who desperately wanted to use one or both of the houses. 

There were lots of leaves and other padding to go along with the interwoven sticks.

The nest was quite impressive.  It took a lot of work to weave all of the sticks together.  They had also used lots of soft material as padding.  Wrens can often have multiple families per year, so we were hopeful either these wrens or some others would move in.

The Second Family.  Although we never saw any more activity around that house, it wasn't too long before a pair of wrens began building a nest in the house above the patio at the back door.  That was particularly exciting since that house had been up since last summer with no tenants.  We don't know if it was the same or different birds.  They seemed to go through the same struggles of learning how to get the long twigs into the small opening as the ones outside the bathroom had endured, but maybe that is always an issue. 

With the bird feeders nearby, there was much more activity in the backyard compared to the side yard.  Some of the other birds (particularly the titmouse) seemed to bother the wrens quite a bit. In particular, the wrens took exception when the titmouse landed on top of their house and bent over to look into the opening.  Without a perch below the entrance hole, the titmouse could only peer over the edge from the roof  In any case, with much yelling and screaming, he was quickly chased away by the wrens. 

Our coming and going through the patio door was also somewhat of a distraction to the wrens, although they eventually seemed to get used to that if we stayed our distance. I also tried setting up the GoPro on the old video tripod.  

With this camera setup I could remotely control it from inside with my iPad.

By controlling it remotely from inside, I thought the birds would be ok.  I am not sure if it was the blinking red light (which I did turn off) or just having something new near the entrance to their house, but they were quick to check it out. 

This wren was concerned (or at least curious) about the camera set up close to the front of his house which is out of the frame to the right.  Notice also the blue jay in the background on the hanging feeder.

Since they were concerned we changed to making most of our observations from inside behind the patio door.

Even from inside, it was easy to see their furious activity going into and out of the bird house.  The poor parents must have been worn out.  They seemed to be continually busy bringing in food and removing little white pouches that we eventually figured out were "disposal diapers".  We had marveled at how clean the other nest had been when we cleaned out the house.  Now we knew why.

Baby Wrens.  Nearing the end of June, we could hear the chirping of the baby birds in the nest when the parents brought food.  We assumed they would be leaving soon, so I had the GoPro ready at the back door (but inside!) on the tripod.  It seemed unlikely we would be at home and watching when they left, but we wanted to be ready if we got lucky.

Well, we got lucky.  It is not great cinematography and I missed a bit of the action at the very beginning, but hopefully the video captures some of the excitement of this momentous event...Moving Day for the Baby Wrens.  I recommend you view the video on full computer screen since wrens are small. However, as you can see, baby wrens are not much smaller than adult wrens.  Also make sure you have turned on the sound.

We cleaned out the house several weeks later.  It was somewhat different than the nest in the other house.   We don't know what they used, but there were copious amounts of some type of white fluffy material, perhaps the stuffing from a chair or some type of insulation.  Whatever it was, it looked to be very nice, soft padding for the little ones.

Inside the bird house that had been over the patio (after the birds left).  Note all of the soft padding.

Except for occasional visits to the feeders or except for visits to scratch around for bugs in the mulch along the fence, we did not see the wrens much for the remainder of the summer.  Based on the success this year, we are hopeful we will have more birds using the houses next spring.  If they do, we may feel confident enough to open up the bird house and take pictures of the nest while it is in use...something we did not do this year.  Stay tuned.