Bird Box Building & Other FUN DIY

Last Christmas I decided to start making nest boxes for birds. I ferreted about in the woodstore and garage and found some scrap timber. I decided to make my first box with only handtools and without Husband to prove how easy it is. I haven’t done much carpentry since I fitted out Seasons Wholefoods in Southsea in the 1980s (Portsmouth’s first wholefood shop and my first enterprise). My skills are rudimentary (it was lack of funds that inspired my first carpentry job). Years later I am pretty rusty and my handsaw isn’t that great either!

I decided to build an open-fronted box for robins and wrens because it was the simplest I could find. I found some good plans at Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust. They have factsheets but here are the basics.

You need either one 48 inch piece of timber, 6 inches wide, and 0.75 inch thick or some scraps that will allow you to make up pieces roughly as per the plan. For wrens and robins the box can actually be a bit smaller and not .75 inch thick but I stuck to them for simplicity. Apparently, the dimensions are a guide and are not critical.

The box can be screwed (with galvanised screws) or nailed together, and small drainage holes should be drilled in the floor. I made sure the roof overhung the box to prevent rain entering the nest area and I hung it in a sheltered side of the shed that didn’t face the sun or prevailing winds.

For a small-hole nest box you need to hinge the roof, either by a non-ferrous hinge and screws or by a rubber strip, so that the box can be cleaned out every summer after its residents have fledged.

I used scrap softwood so I treated the box with a water based preservative. All in all the box cost me nothing to make, and took very little time at all to cut, screw together, preserve and hang. Next time I plan to use oak off-cuts that are usually burnt as kindling from a cabinet maker I know and then I won’t even have to protect the wood.

Here is my simple box:

Here's the garden with a home-made bird table in the depth of the recent snow.

It was amazing how many birds came to feed. I am sure we saved many lives. (The longtail tits are among my favourites.)

If you want to make boxes with small holes for a variety of birds, they are apparently fairly choosy. Here is a simple criteria to follow:

25 mm for blue, coal and marsh tits

28 mm for great tits, tree sparrows and pied flycatchers

32 mm for house sparrows and nuthatches

45 mm for starlings.

If you have lots of squirrels in your garden or magpies you may like to put a metal plate over the hole to stop them excavating them and stealing the eggs or fledgelings. You can buy them online from a bird box kit seller.

Here’s a link for to help you design and site your boxes properly from the RSPB.

What’s Next?

As we now have two greater spotted woodpeckers who we think are male and female, I am going to build them a box next. Then I intend to move on to a kestrel box and site it nearby in a neighbour's paddock, both plans being from the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust again.

I also plan to build another box and add a camera in the roof asap. These usally cost £100 or more but I reckon I could use a colour reversing camera that you put on the back of a car. They are available on eBay at a fraction of the price. The camera will be wired to a monitor in my kitchen (it’s a bit expensive to do it wireless) and will allow us to watch our wrens breeding without disturbing them.

Then I want to make a special reptile habitat as we have attracted common lizards and slowworms to our garden since we permacultured it...

And I am also going to make a Hobo stove!

Of course, I will post all the plans and photographs here as I complete each project and I'll let you know who comes to raise a family in my back garden.

Maddy Harland is the editor of Permaculture Magazine.

If you would like to read about the development of her permaculture garden from a bare arable field to a thriving biodiverse and productive forest garden, please see the latest issue of Permaculture Magazine. Subscribe to the paper version or digitally.

You can also read a FREE sample copy of Permaculture Magazine online.

Maddy & Tim’s garden will be featured on The Edible Garden, a new BBC Gardeners World series, on BBC2 on March 16^th at 8 pm.

Permaculture Design is for Disaster Relief, Not Just for Gardens

Daryl Hughes, Bangor, UK wrote to us today with a plea to tell the world via Permaculture Magazine about the growing applicability of permaculture solutions to natural disasters. This makes total sense. We started seeing permaculture design applied to refugee camps in Macedonia, Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Dave Clark worked with aid agencies encouraging the building of more sustainable settlements for refugees. Others, like Max Lindegger of Ecological Solutions in Australia, took ecovillage design skills to Sri Lanka after the Tsunami to great effect and rebuilt communities to an ecological standard with many carbon saving devices and designs.

When you get masses of dispossessed people without infrastructure or homes you get an excess of untreated sewage, polluted water systems and great risk of waterborne diseases like cholera, a critical lack of food not only in the short but medium term, a lack of shelter and cooking facilities. Deforestation escalates as wood becomes a primary cooking fuel. There is also heavy metal and other forms of pollution arising from collapsed infrastructure.

What can permaculture offer? All the low impact techniques like hygienic compost toilet design, blackwater and greywater recycling are obvious. Then the provision of low energy devices like rocket stoves and solar cookers is vital. These cost little and can be made out of old tin drums and satellite dishes. They reduce the need for wood and protect the natural environment. Then there is the planting of instant gardens and planning of sustainable urban and rural agriculture. If we take a leaf out of Cuba's book we can see that not only are organic polycultures desirable; they work well in both town and country. Next then can come the micro-generation systems for energy that are far more resilient than large scale coal or nuclear plants. God forbid we build more of these, not only for atmospheric carbon from the former, but also for the risk of nuclear leaks in a world that is increasingly knocked by natural disasters. Give power back to the (little) people, as well as developing larger scale renewables; it is far more resilient to natural disasters.

When New Orleans was inundated with flood water, a big problem was heavy metal and petroleum leaks. The permaculturists there developed methods of producing compost teas, and used mycelium to clean the soil. We have the 'technology', we have the experience within the movement, we just need the opportunity to take these techniques and designs where they are needed.

Here's a cob oven from the permaculture area at Glastonbury Festival. Note the temporary garden that has been planted in front of it:



Here's a satellite dish solar cooker from Glastonbury's green fields:



And here's a fabulous design for a communal stove built out of scrap metal (diamond plating used for walkways and to cover holes in roads) from the permaculture area again:



In every issue of PM we publish low impact, ecological solutions from people who actually make and use them. These are just as applicable to disaster areas as they are to people wishing to reduce their ecological impact in more temperate climates. Issue 63, for example, has step-by-step instruction on how to build a trickle charger wind turbine from a bicycle wheel and a dynamo. Useful for an allotment shed but also equally useful for people with no money and no lighting in a post-apocalyptic place like Haiti.

Darryl wrote to us today and told us that there is at least one team of permaculturists who were in Haiti when the earthquake struck and are now trying to help in any way they can:

http://oursoil.org/

At the same time, there is a growing buzz on the internet about the applicability of permaculture solutions to natural disasters:

http://www.permacultureguild.us/help-for-haiti-from-permaculture/
http://punkrockpermaculture.com/2010/01/13/haiti-earthquake-permaculture/

Some are calling for a Permaculture Relief Corps. Whatever catchy name we give it, the idea is that the range of solutions permaculture already uses can help people affected by disasters to meet their immediate and long-term needs, such as quick construction of composting toilets to improve sanitation. I am not sure to what extent this already happens with the main aid organisations, but many people find the idea of a Permaculture disaster response team inspiring.

Here's one more link I found:
http://pinpartnership.org/index.php/site/

According to punkrockpermaculture.com "Stuart Leiderman (Lakou Permaculture) is on the ground in Haiti right now calling out for help stateside with coordinating a long term Permaculture Relief Corps effort."

There will be more in the coming days and weeks.

Thank you, Daryl Hughes, for reminding us of this aspect of permaculture. Permaculture Magazine will of course be reporting on this in the forthcoming news page in PM63 (out by the end of the month) and will run more full length articles on the subject in future issues.

Maddy Harland is editor of Permaculture Magazine.

P.S. For those of you who are waiting for my birdbox designs, I will post them later in the week.

Wild Birds, Saving Lives & Preparing For the Mating Season!

The snow has made feeding garden birds vital for their survival. We started last autumn when one of my immediate family became very ill and spent many days at home, unable to go out. Being a lover of David Attenborough programmes virtually from birth and birds in particular, I thought she would appreciate a closer view of our garden birds.

I duly excavated our store (aka junk room) and found a peanut feeder, seed feeder and bought a few fat balls. The response during this cold weather has been spectacular. We have had visits from four kinds of tit (blue, coal, great, willow and longtailed), a greater spotted woodpecker, gold and greenfinches and hedge and house sparrows. Blackbirds, thrushes, robins and a female pheasant forage nearby on the ground. Sparrow hawks are inevitably overhead and we have even had a visit from fieldfare.



The teeming bird life has given my girl a great deal of pleasure but soon the whole family were hooked. We started making our own fat balls full of seeds and buying 30kg sacks of seed wholesale rather than little bags at greater cost. The fat balls were made in small cups of seed mixed with melted lard with a little twig inserted in the drying mixture to hang them from and the sacks came from a pet ‘warehouse’. I’m not sure how you’d make a vegan alternative to lard or dripping.

Some people feed budgies, hamsters and cats, we feed garden birds. They are our wild friends, never to be pets, and our indulgence. We know that by feeding them we will save lives this winter. We have already found a young buzzard corpse in the woods that starved in the pre-Christmas snow. We also know that feeding birds regularly will allow for two broods instead of one later in the year. With our habitats being destroyed by out of town shopping centres and endless housing sprawl over greenfields where we live, bird populations of once common species like sparrows and starlings are plummeting.


We also know that feeding small garden birds will encourage sparrow hawks to take a few out and mice will come for a meal too. This will attract the buzzards as well but we love raptors and do not begrudge them a meal. Being human and selective, we do have our pests: rats and tree rats, aka grey squirrels. Squirrels are little loved in our garden. They eat the cherry blossom in spring and our entire crop of English walnuts. We had to harvest cobnuts too early last autumn, before they swelled adequately, because otherwise we would have lost all of them to squirrels. Rats? Well, we seem to have an instinctive dislike. I think it stems back to the Black Death, even though logic says they are of the brown variety and not flea ridden black.


Siting Nest Boxes

Feeding birds was not enough. I decided with my limited carpentry skills to make bird boxes. They are easy and anyone can do it, even me. First of all I researched how to site them and then I found plans. Siting is commonsense. There are a few provisos:

* Boxes for tits, sparrows or starlings need to be fixed two to four metres up a tree or a wall. (Larger birds like woodpeckers, owls and kestrels need higher nesting sites and more specific conditions. (More of this later in the month…)
* Make sure there is shade – if there isn’t natural shade from trees or buildings during the day, face the box between north and east, avoiding strong sunlight and the wettest winds.
* Ensure that the birds have a clear flight path to the nest with no clutter directly in front of the entrance.
* House sparrows and starlings will readily use nestboxes placed high up under the eaves. These birds nest in colonies so two or three boxes can be sited spaced out on the same side of the house.
* Don’t mix up sparrow ‘terraces’ with house martin sites. They like their own space.
* Ideally, put up boxes in the autumn as birds like to investigate them long before nesting. They will even roost in them, especially during very cold weather.
* Open-fronted boxes for robins and wrens need to be low down, below 2m, well hidden in vegetation although I have had robins nesting in my open greenhouse and wrens nesting just inside the wood shed in a fairly busy place by the house.
* Those for spotted flycatchers and treecreepers need to be 2-4m high, sheltered by vegetation but with a clear outlook. Woodpecker boxes need to be 3-5m high on a tree trunk with a clear flight path and away from disturbance.
* Birds are territorial. Two boxes close together may be occupied by the same species if they are at the edge of adjoining territories and there is plenty of natural food. This happens in the countryside, but not often in gardens, so my plan is to cater for one nesting pair of each species, except sparrows who are sociable (and house martins who do not venture up our road from their aerie by the pub).

Having read up about siting boxes I then got to work finding the best plans for making them. I’ll be back in a few days with my finds and share all the links with you.

Maddy Harland is editor of Permaculture Magazine