BIRD HOUSES AND HOW TO BUILD THEM. 
5 
Ordinary wooden boxes, if clean, can be made into Inrd bouses Ijy 
merely nailing on a cover and cutting out an entrance hole. Such 
makeshifts are rarely weatherproof and are never pleasing to the eye. 
Branches containing real woodpecker holes, when ob¬ 
tainable, arc perhaps the best attraction that can 
be offered most house birds in the breeding seasoii. 
By carefully fitting such a branch to a fruit or shade 
(: 
d 
Trmrt 
Fig. 5.—Gourds for wrens or bluebirds. 
Fig. 6.—House made 
from hollow log. 
tree its foreign origin will scarcely be noticed. The 
house shown in figure 6 is suitable for use in trees. 
It is made from a log or large branch, hollowed by 
decay, and fitted with a top and bottom as illustrated 
in the figure. The cover 
Fig. 4.—Gourds ar 
ranged for martins. 
is to go on after the log is 
Either 
fastened in place. 
the top or bottom should be removable. 
Methods of doing this are shown in figures 
23 and 26. Another way of making a log 
house is to split a straight-grained log 2 
feet or more in length through the middle 
and then to cut out a cavity with a gouge. 
The excavations in the two halves can be 
made to match exactly by means of a 
pattern or template having the size and 
shape desired for the proposed cavity 
through the plane of cleavage. Figure 7 
shows the appearance of such a house and how to place the template 
symmetrically on each half of the stick. The top of this house 
should be covered with tin or zinc to keep out moisture. The halves 
should be fastened together with screws to allow the house lo be 
taken apart and cleaned. 
