Interlopers from a House Wren’s Point of View

Raucous Birds of Summer

Their fierce yellow eyes cop a glare at the sky.

They puff their bronze-sheened feathers

like hair rising on the back of a black dog’s neck,

cop a glare at the sky,

kick, shake a big foot

off the side of the sunflower feeder

as if tuned to staccato street rhythms,

cop a glare at the sky.

Poke sharp beaks

heedlessly strewing seeds.

One opens his big-beaked mouth

like a cat, hissing—

off with wrens, cardinals, chickadees!

Messieurs grackles have hit town.

We had a saying on the Iowa farm where I grew up: “It’s so hot, you can hear the corn grow.”

July has been that way this year—hot and speckled with thunderstorms that rattle the windows, bringing drenching rains that flood crops here in southwestern Michigan.

Still, the outdoors beckons. I’m not a morning person, but driven by weeds I cannot tolerate, I climb out of bed earlier each morning to swathe myself in essential oils against ubiquitous mosquitoes and brave the morning’s rays. Once weeded, I dump mulch on flower beds, hoping to stave off the need to yank out more interlopers during sweltering summer.

While I’m outside prying out roots and tossing mulch about, a wren sits atop her house on our path alongside a ravine, skirting the wide and shallow Love Creek. She scolds. She fusses. She lifts her tail and chatters, her whole body expressing outrage at my incursion into her space. Never mind that we put up the birdhouse, that we fill the birdbath with fresh, cool water every morning, and Mother Nature provides ample numbers of flies, beetles, earwigs, daddy longlegs and other tasty tidbits.

This place is hers.

She deserves it. I am the interloper here.

When grackles appear in our yard, as they are wont to do mid-summer, they won’t find hospitable space. They will find a determined, noisy little house wren defending her second brood.

Looking for a project for yourself or to share with a child this summer?

How about building a birdhouse now to install early next year? The Cornell Lab of Ornithology offers free downloadable birdhouse plans specific to various species along with a map which shows in which areas of the U.S. specific species are in decline. More and more holes in trees and other traditional bird homes vanish every day as humans fell trees and co-opt nature. For instance, the American kestrel is in decline across wide swaths of the U.S., and even the hardy house wren is declining in the northwestern and northeastern U.S. Add to those two areas, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma as areas seeing a decline of the American robin. By building a birdhouse, you are doing your bit to help them survive.

https://nestwatch.org/learn/all-about-birdhouses/

For techie folks, the Cornell website even shows how to install a web cam so that you can watch the action inside a bird’s domain with your kids or grandkids. How cool would that be?