You may recollect this photo of a cheeky squirrel occupying a bird box intended for blue tits. At first they used to take turns in sitting on the sloping roof and to counteract this I added a more severe sloping bit on topbut once they got the hang of sitting on this they - or was it a s/he only - mastered hanging face down from it and peering into the entrance hole. S/he then chewed at the hole over some weeks to make it bigger and then climbed in after much contortion to use it as a bolt hole in wet weather. So, no blue tit occupants last summer.
The enlarged hole can be seen more clearly in the second picture.
So now I have changed the slope of the roof and added a metal cover to form a bird sized entrance 0f 25 mm. Unfortunately my carpentry was not too good and so I had to add a very squirrel friendly horizontal strip on top of the apex to make it weather tight. To reduce the "friendliness" I have put in some screws into the top piece and hopefully even the agile squirrels will not find this comfortable. Within an hour of putting the new box up a blue tit was investigating it. My fingers are crossed for the bird.
2 comments:
It seems to me like you have divided loyalties - on the one hand you're proofing the bird box against squirrels... but at the top left of your web page there's a permanent picture of a squirrel!
Are the bird box modifications just a new challenge for your squirrel friends to overcome?
I should have called it "Squirrel battle", which I am determined to win on behalf of the underdogs...I mean birds.
As international relations show today's allies can become tomorrow's enemies, and vice versa. However this is more of skirmish than anything else so far.
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