“I know what to do!” exclaimed Norma, now. “I’ll go and ask Mrs. Tompkins in the morning. She’ll know and tell us what to do.”
Mrs. James and the house scouts laughed, and the former said: “Norma runs to her Oracle for everything, now.”
“We might experiment with a feeding station, too, if you want to attract and hold the birds about the house until they get acclimated to their new quarters. Then they will remain late into the fall and return early in the spring,” was Miss Mason’s suggestion.
“I wonder what kind of birds we can coax to our houses?” queried Natalie, boring a hole in one of the boxes with an augur.
“I’ve seen wrens, bluebirds, robins, thrashers, cat birds, orioles and many not so familiar, flying about the farm, so that ought to be a fair idea of the kind we may hope to house very soon,” replied Mrs. James.
“One bird we can depend on coming and trying to crowd out all the others,” giggled Natalie.
“Yes, the English sparrow,” agreed Janet. “I wish we could raise the rent on them, or do some other restrictive act that would warn them from the premises.”
“The only way I know of is to keep the doors of the nests small enough for a wren and too small for a sparrow. All the other birds will fight off the sparrows, but the wren won’t—they just move away,” explained Mrs. James.
“Look at this hole, is it about the right size, Jimmy?” asked Norma as she finished the boring in the wood.
“Speaking of the wren, I want to tell you a little story of one I found nesting under the eaves of my brother’s country house. Its nest was dangerously near the rose trellis where a cat could climb up and get it, but it wanted to be near the people in the house, and that was the only available spot where a nest would perch. So we built a special corner bracket and shelf for it, and when Jenny laid her eggs we very gently and carefully moved the nest to a safe place, before she had really started brooding over them. We knew she would not abandon the eggs because of the moving, but we felt much easier when we realized she was safe.”