The Questions Started With the Wren

New York Times

07-07-2025

Of all the nest boxes in our yard, the Carolina chickadees always choose the hanging box in the rose arbor. Every year the female builds her beautiful nest of moss and lays her clutch of speckled eggs. How many eggs? I never know. With chickadees it can be as many as a dozen, as few as three.
But if I hear the glorious, burbling river of song that means a northern house wren has arrived, I know the chickadees don't stand a chance. A house wren is a tiny, feathered terrorist. He pulls the nests out of occupied boxes and fills the unoccupied ones with sticks to prevent other birds from nesting there. He scoots unseen in the underbrush, emerging only to puncture the eggs and kill the young in any unguarded nest. If a house wren has any say in the matter, all the nests here are doomed.
This year a house wren arrived on April 9. Less than a week later the chickadee nest was in tatters, tangled in the rose canes. I held my breath every time I checked the bluebird box, but the bluebirds held their own against the encroacher. All four of their babies grew up and safely flew into the trees.
Bluebirds generally start nesting again very soon after their young fledge — while the male cares for the fledglings, the female builds a new nest — so I cleaned out the box, treated it with food-grade diatomaceous earth to keep the ants out, reinstalled the wire nest lift meant to thwart parasites and waited for round two.
But when the bluebirds left the nest box this year, they also left the yard and did not return. Were they taking their babies as far from the house wren as they could get?
The wren, meanwhile, continued his rounds, moving from nest box to nest box, laying claim to them all. A female wren, if one ever arrives, will have four empty boxes to choose from. Will one ever arrive? Or choose him if she does? I don't know. I've spent 30 years learning the ways of this wild yard, and still there are so many mysteries.
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