I decided that since there was a little sun today...I would clean out the birdhouses. It was quite a job, carrying the ladder and tools around the property. Most of the 25 birdhouses looked like this one...full of last year's nesting materials, bird poop, insects...etc. I carried a scraper to clean this stuff out, I did not want to touch it with my hands. A good thing too, one birdhouse had about 30 queen yellow jackets hibernating inside (I killed them.) that surprised me when I peaked inside. The strange and funny ones have a wren surprise inside, a male wren will make several stick nests for his mate. She will decide to use one, and rearrange it into a real nest. The others...left with a pile of small sticks filling them up. Funny...really! Did you know that the swallows and other small birds roost in birdhouses when the weather is bad, or just for safety. I sure can agree, the birdhouses had heavy amounts of bird poop on the top of the old nest.
