Female House Wren, Little Maquoketa River Valley, Iowa
We have two identical bird boxes in our front yard that have been used since many years by meanwhile several generations of House Wrens to raise their offspring every summer. At the moment we can see different activities at each one of them. A pair of wrens feeds their babies in box #2. We can hear the chirping, but we haven’t seen the juveniles yet. Pretty soon, as they will grow bigger, the juveniles will stick their heads out of the hole in anticipation of food from the parents. At the moment the parents come back with food about every 5 - 10 minutes.
No, not food, just nest material!
Bird box #1 is right in front of our porch and nest building activities took place already in May. I can’t watch it all the time but it seemed we lost a brood a few weeks ago in this box. Today I watched a female doing some “fine tuning” of the nest. As you can see the wren has some soft “cotton” from a cottonwood tree in its bill. I can’t think of any better natural material to upholster a nest for holding the fragile little eggs of a House Wren. This all might be very boring for some, but watching this so close since many years has not lost its appeal to us…