Empty Houses

Do birdhouses in the city do any good? I see plenty of them in our neighbourhood, and we have one ourselves. No one uses ours, which is probably a blessing since almost all of our birds are house sparrows. Still, I check it regularly just to make sure no one's crawled in and gotten into trouble. Once birds set themselves up in a home you provide, you do have a responsibility to protect!

Most of these birdhouses were probably put up by children. Just three days before he died in January, our young friend Heiko painted a bright blue, yellow, and red birdhouse that I hope will grace a backyard this summer. Perhaps this birdhouse, a couple blocks south on our street, was also a youthful effort.


This one, nestled in the fork of a silver maple, is the work of older hands.

Originally, it was perched on a pole beside our old neighbour Bus's house. After he died and the house was sold, a new family moved in. We've been sad to see the garden that Bus (and later the interim neighbours Scott and Ian) built and tended with love slowly fall apart under the feet of seven-now-almost nine-year old triplets. But for some reason, even though they dismantled much of what Bus had built, the new family kept his little birdhouse.

This house, which unbeknownst to us hung in the maple on our front lawn all last summer, revealed itself once the leaves fell. And it hung on through wind and rain, ice storms, and heavy snowfalls. It even survived teenagers trying to knock it out with rocks.

Such a delicate, papery thing. It was finally felled on Friday when the City came and trimmed our tree. Now we'll have to hang some fake wasp nests to keep a new colony from setting up shop this summer. They won't be nearly as pretty.