Humans do the strangest things. I’ll grant that putting up a little house to protect birds as they nest is a nice thing to do, but standing in the garden first to try to work out which way is north on a cloudy winters day is not that straightforward. My Mistress has a general idea but in the end resorted to a satellite map on the internet as being a little more accurate. Apparently, our little feathered friends are fussy about where their houses are. As a dog, I will get into a bed pretty much anywhere, but the same is not true of the birds. The doorway not only has to be a particular size but has to point between south-east and north-east. It’s no wonder the bird population is so fussy, there must be such a shortage of suitable housing stock for them.
By luck, it turned out that the side of the summerhouse that we can see from the office points in the right direction. The next box is now securely fastened to the wall and ready for any blue tits or wrens that are house hunting in our area. I asked if I could put a little estate agents board outside saying ‘for sale or to let’ but My Mistress said that they don’t go through any application process and the first we’ll know is when they start moving in. She also said when we start shedding in the spring we might want to donate our spare dog hair to keep them warm. It seems odd that they will still need it to keep warm when we clearly don’t.
I would have liked to put one of those little webcams in so we could watch what was going on, but my Mistress said that even garden birds deserved a bit of privacy and as she didn’t have a camera on my every activity she thought I should respect that. She has a point. If I was being tracked by camera it might limit my food raiding parties to James’s bedroom.