INSTRUCTIONS AND PROPHECIES OF THE Blessed MOTHER ALIPIA GOLOSEEVSKY, Kyiv...
Summer season!For all of us lucky owners country house, a house in a village or a dacha, a personal plot, a garden and a vegetable garden, and for all those who only dream about it - I have prepared a lot thematic "dacha" albums and thousands of interesting ideas for a house and a summer residence with their own hands, ideas for a site, ideas for a garden and a kitchen garden with their own hands. I hope they will inspire you to new achievements and amazing finds in the design of your cozy rest and fruitful work!
For the soul and comfortable outdoor recreation- ideas for decorating the veranda and terrace of a country house, as well as ideas for a small garden house, ideas for a summer bedroom, kitchen and even summer shower! Ideas for interior design of summer cottages and country houses. Ideas garden furniture with your own hands. Ideas for decorating a country house with your own hands.
For the soul and joy of the eyes- ideas landscape design suburban area, ideas for small pond and waterfalls with their own hands, beautiful garden paths, ideas for decorating a garden and a vegetable garden, ideas for a flower bed with your own hands, ideas for garden decor with your own hands, ideas for a house and a garden from improvised materials with your own hands - many, many amazing things! Get inspired!
The site about interior design InterierKlub has a lot of ideas for do-it-yourself interior design, ideas for home, summer cottage and garden! You may be interested in:
Do-it-yourself bird houses in the garden, unusual do-it-yourself bird houses.
Waking up with the first rays of the sun to the sonorous cheerful chirping of birds outside the window is one of the most magnificent charms country life! It is our pleasant duty to take care of the feathered inhabitants of our garden. For some, some birds are garden thieves, I don’t know ... I don’t feel sorry for a few strawberries or currant sprigs for birds ... For me personally, birds are the greatest pleasure for the soul, eyes and ears. And what about without them?! Feeders and bird houses are the smallest, but very important thing that you and I can do for our little neighbors in the country house, plot and garden. For example, on our site there is always a bird cafe full of guests)) and several birdhouses, and also, my daughter’s tree house has recently been occupied by a dove - a wood pigeon, it so happened that he came to us along the path (problems with wings) and stayed ... You won’t quit, after all!
But I will certainly use some of the ideas from my new collection and make some unusual bird houses for the next nesting season. It's so easy and so great! The main thing is to fix them where the ubiquitous cats won't get them))... Get inspired!
Ideas for a home and a summer cottage with your own hands, ideas for a garden and a vegetable garden with your own hands, ideas for a summer residence and a summer cottage with your own hands:
- Ideas from an old basin for giving
- Garden decor from flower pots
- DIY mosaic garden decor
- DIY garden decor ideas
- Flower bed from old shoes
- A flower bed from an old chair
- A flower bed from an old chest of drawers
In 2015, the Russian Bird Conservation Union chose the redstart as the "Bird of the Year". In nature, redstarts use for nesting hollows hollowed out by woodpeckers, various natural holes in trees, for example, where a rotten branch has fallen out. They can also nest in depressions in human buildings. Like other hollow nesters, redstarts often lack convenient nesting sites. Redstarts can live in birdhouses and titmouses - houses with a small round notch, where great tits and pied flycatchers usually settle. But special houses with a wide entrance (notch) are more suitable for redstarts. In addition to the common redstart, gray flycatchers and field sparrows can live in such a house. Redstarts can live in a house hung in an old park or garden. In nature, their favorite habitats are pine forests; "Red Vostok" not far from the edge of an old pine forest is a real gift for a bird.
Like other small hollow-nesting birds, redstarts feed their chicks on caterpillars, collecting several hundred of them per day. So together with one or two pairs of a pair of nesting birds, they will provide a garden good protection from pests. In winter, the red vodka, like the titmouse, can serve as titmouse for the night.
Hanging houses for redstarts is best at the end of winter or early spring. Then the redstarts arriving from their winter quarters in mid-April will have time to find it before nesting begins. But you can hang it later - then, perhaps, it will be occupied by birds nesting for the second time (this happens). Do not hang too high - a height of 3-4 meters is enough, and where people do not disturb the birds - even 1.5 meters. The letok of the house, if possible, should look to the south or east, so that the sun hits it in the morning. It is not necessary to hang artificial nests too close to each other, it is better to keep a distance of at least 20 meters between them. Each pair of birds guards its territory, and even if there are several houses on one tree, the birds will live in only one.
The chicks hatched in an artificial house will try to return to their place of birth next year. Small birds themselves do not know how to clean the houses, therefore, in order for artificial nests to serve for many years, old nests must be shaken out of them in autumn or winter. To do this, the houses are equipped with a removable cover. If the house is not cleaned, the birds can use it for 2-3 years; if cleaned - 5-7 years or more (until it rots and falls apart).
How to build a redstart house
Connect the side walls (BS) to the bottom (D) with self-tapping screws, attach the back wall (WS) and the front wall (PS) to them, with the smooth side out and the rough side in. A rough wall is needed so that the grown chicks can get out of the nest. Put the lid on top. At first, the lid is put on loosely. To prevent it from falling, you can fix it with one self-tapping screw. On the street from moisture, the cover will swell and, if it is tightly kept dry, then it will be difficult to remove it.
March in the yard. It is high time to take care of the nesting places for the bird population of the district. What kind of birds do we want to see in our garden?
The great tit and the blue tit are real gardener's helpers, one of the most useful birds in forestry and park management. If you regularly fed your titmouse in the winter, then in the spring they will not forget the way to your garden. But no matter how hospitable the feeder may be, tits will not remain in the garden or in the park if there is not a hollow, a house suitable for building a nest.
Most often, people make nesting houses for starlings - birdhouses (they are also willingly inhabited by sparrows). Undoubtedly, the starling deserves to build a house for him. One starling brood in 5 days can eat about 1000 May beetles and their larvae, not counting the huge number of caterpillars and slugs. Observations of ornithologists say that the starling most often hunts not in the garden near the house, but in the nearest forest or in the field, while the titmouse works only in the area where its nest is located. So - choose. Maybe, first of all, to help small birds? Such as blue tit, garden redstart, pied flycatcher, white wagtail. These birds usually settle in hollows, and few people remember them in the spring, which is a pity. My opinion: you need to attract as many small birds as possible to gardens, parks, squares and shelterbelts, and leave villages and the outskirts of forest parks for starlings. It is most correct if for every five houses for small birds hang out one birdhouse. Such a measure will keep the starling in our gardens and yards, but will reduce its numbers. There is another, very original, method of keeping the number of starlings within reasonable limits. The fact is that in a spacious standard house a pair of starlings raises three to six chicks, and in a cramped birdhouse with a bottom of 12x12 centimeters (as in a natural hollow) - two or three.
The material for nesting houses can be any dry board with a thickness of at least 1.5 centimeters (2-2.5 centimeters is best), as well as tessellations, slabs, solid logs or logs with a hollow. Thin boards and plywood are unsuitable: they are short-lived, warp quickly. You can make a hollow out of a log, but compared to a house, it has no advantages, and it is much more difficult to make it.
From the outside of the house, the boards can be planed, but with inside they cannot be processed smooth surface it is very difficult for chicks (and adult birds) to get out. If the boards turn out to be smooth, then before assembling the house on its front wall - from the inside, below the notch - it is necessary to make horizontal notches with a chisel or knife. Outside, under the entrance, no sills are needed, the birds do remarkably well without them. It is good if there is a branch near the tree house: tits and flycatchers, before flying into the nest, like to sit on the sidelines and look around. The letok is drilled with a brace or hollowed out with a narrow chisel. If there is nothing to cut a round hole, let it be square. To do this, saw off the upper corner of the front wall. The titmouse differs from the birdhouse primarily in the diameter of the notch. To inspect the house before the arrival of birds and clean it from the remnants of last year's nest, the roof is made removable, strengthening it so that neither the wind nor the crow can bring it down. The simplest fastening option is to pull the lid to the house with wire, the more complex one is the spikes provided in the design of the side walls and the roof. More rational flat roof with a slight tilt back, the gable will begin to leak faster.
When assembling the house, first a bar is nailed to the back wall, with which the nesting box is attached to a tree or pole. The side walls are nailed to the bottom, then the front and, finally, the back with a bar. To fasten the walls to the bottom, it is better to use not nails, but screws. We must try to make the house firmly knocked down, without cracks. If any are formed, they are caulked with tow or smeared with clay.
The houses begin to be hung in February, as some sedentary and nomadic birds (sparrows, tits, nuthatches) look for nesting places very early. AT middle lane European part of Russia, the latest hanging date is the end of March. Flycatcher houses can be hung up until the end of April. Best time for hanging titmice - autumn: by spring, the nesting place will darken, become part of the tree.
The feathered house should be modest and inconspicuous, hanging vertically or with a slight inclination forward. Birdhouses suspended with a tilt back, as a rule, are not populated.
Least "picky" to appearance artificial nesting sparrows and starlings. Other birds do not like to settle in bright or freshly planed houses. Before hanging, they are painted with a strong solution of potassium permanganate or lightly coated with earth. Pied flycatcher often ignores the house darkened over the years. But it is worth whitewashing it inside with chalk - and the situation will change. The great tit, on the contrary, prefers twilight in the nest. Birdhouses can be painted on the outside with oil paint.
In noisy, crowded places - parks, squares - nesting places for birds should be placed higher: birdhouses - 5-6, titmouse - 4 meters from the ground. In a calm garden setting, a titmouse can hang at a height of 2 meters.
Unlike the starling, the great tit is very selective in its choice of nesting sites. It is better to make a house for her from thick boards and also without cracks. It is advisable to cover the titmouse in the crown of the tree, but the branches should not close the notch. Neither tits, nor flycatchers, nor redstarts like open, wind-blown, sunny places. The wagtail differs in that it cannot cling to vertical surfaces with its paws - therefore, it never settles in birdhouses. But if you make a special house and hang it under the eaves of a non-residential wooden building, a pair of wagtails will willingly build a nest there.
There is different ways fastening nests to a tree. The simplest option is this. Outside, a 6-7-cm nail is driven into the side walls of the house exactly in the middle of the cut of the back wall, retreating from above by 1/3 of the entire length of the wall. The nail is driven in from the bottom up. The end of a hemp rope or soft wire (aluminum should be insulated) is wound around one of the nails, thrown over the roof, slightly pulled and brought under the second nail. Then they cover the trunk or thick bough of the tree with a rope and fix the end on the nail. For this kind of fastening, old electrical cords are good.
To hang the house, you need a light 4-meter ladder. It's better to work in pairs. You can make a loop at the ends of the rope in advance and put them on nails when hanging. The rope on the tree is placed obliquely to the shaft of the trunk, and not across it.
Where should the letok of the house look? In a park where winds and rains are held back by trees, it is not necessary to strictly follow the direction of the entrance. Before you hang the nest on open space, it is necessary to establish exactly from which side in your area in summer rains and winds most often come.
A properly made house can serve as birds for several years.
bird houses
( Dimensions are in centimeters)
We attract birds to the garden with houses
With the advent of spring, all kinds of insects wake up in the garden, many of which can cause great harm to fruit and berry plants. One of the most effective and safe ways pest control - attract birds to the garden. insects for them delicious treat, and they will gladly hunt them without flying far from home. Our task is to build them such a house, next to which there would be food. Usually birds willingly populate man-made bird houses if they are made with love and conscience. It is convenient to hide in them from bad weather and predators, as well as lay eggs and feed chicks.
Many call bird houses birdhouses. Starlings in Russia have long been revered and loved, although there are opinions that they were also eaten. He was considered the herald of spring, and by hanging wooden nests in the garden, people attracted him in this way to their lands. The name "birdhouse" has taken root and now few people know that bird houses can be intended for other birds, differing in design and size. So, for example, you can build titmouses, flycatchers, shakers, hollows and half-hollows.
In addition to starlings, great benefit great tits are brought for the garden. They are insectivorous birds and eat as much pests as they weigh! When making a house for a titmouse, one feature must be taken into account. In nature, these birds prefer to settle in the hollows of trees, so they often refuse to populate the square birdhouses that people offer them. For these birds, it is better to make titmouses of an octagonal or rounded shape.
Before starting work on creating bird houses, you need to decide for which birds it is intended. The size, height of the notch and other structural features of the nest depend on this. Below we suggest that you familiarize yourself with the options for "birdhouses".
— Birdhouse ordinary . The height of the structure is 30-40 cm, the dimensions of the bottom are 15x16 cm. The diameter of the notch is 5 cm. The distance from the notch to the bottom is 24 cm. The hanging height is from 3 m.
— Sinichnik (a reduced copy of the birdhouse). Height 25-30 cm, bottom dimensions 10x12-14 cm. Notch diameter 3-3.5 cm, distance from notch to bottom 18 cm. Hanging height 2-5 m. This house is perfect not only for great tits, but and for blue titmouse, sparrows, pied flycatchers, redstarts, wrynecks, nuthatches and pygmy owls.
— flycatcher . It differs from the titmouse with a height of 8-10 cm, but otherwise it is a variation of it. Intended for settlement by pied flycatchers, gray flycatchers and redstarts.
— Wagtail . This nesting is built on the opposite principle. The height and width are 15 cm at a depth of 30 cm. Before entering the house, it is necessary to make a small ledge, 10 cm wide. It is needed so that birds can “land” on it before entering the dwelling. Wagtails are "walking" birds, so they cannot cling to the edge of the notch with their paws.
— Poluduplyanka . In terms of size and shape, the structure resembles a titmouse with only one difference - a larger notch. Its width should be equal to the width of the house itself, and the height should be 2 times less than the height of the house. This nesting option is intended for those species of birds that prefer to settle not in hollows, but in natural tree voids.
— duplyanka . In shape and texture, it is as close as possible to the natural nesting.
It is made from a fragment of a tree trunk, from which the core is removed, and a notch is cut out in one of the walls. The structure is upholstered with boards, leaving a notch open for birds to access.
- If it is intended to attract common pikas or short-toed pika, then the design should be triangular with two holes. In nature, the second exit saves the bird in the event of an attack on the nest of a predator. Nesting height 22-26 cm, width 14-20 cm, entrance width 3x6 cm.
Among the birds that inhabit the nests built by man, only starlings "take out the trash", keeping the house clean. The owners will have to clean up after the rest of the birds. garden plot. Therefore, it is better to make the roof or one of the walls of the birdhouse open so that at the end of the warm season you can remove the remains of the old nest and debris.
Hang up birdhouses and titmouses better in autumn so that the birds have time to get used to them and not be afraid of new objects for them in their familiar territory. But you can do this in the spring, if for some reason it did not work out in the fall.
In the next article, we will talk about how to build a birdhouse and a titmouse with your own hands.
Not everyone knows that the main defenders of the garden and vegetable garden in the backyard are birds. But this is true. Birds are greedy. Sometimes their gluttony is not only surprising, but also amazing.
How many pests do birds eat
The white wagtail, weighing 17 g, eats pests with a total weight of 21 g per day. This is 126% of the mass of feed to the mass of the bird. In the wren, this percentage reaches 180, in the chiffchaff - 190. This need for feed is explained at great expense energy during flights, when there is a very intensive metabolism and the body temperature of some birds reaches 42 °.
The activity of birds increases markedly during the feeding of chicks. The white wagtail, the gray flycatcher, the great tit return to their nest with food more than three hundred times in a day alone, the chiffchaff and the pied flycatcher - more than four hundred. A pair of starlings can fill up three birdhouses with the food that a pair of starlings brings to their chicks. The pied flycatcher, whose weight is less than 10 g, feeds its generation, usually consisting of 5 chicks, over 1 kg of insects in 15-16 days of nesting, and great tits - twice as much.
That's why try to attract to your household plot insectivorous beneficial birds, help them, make artificial nests for them.
Bird house requirements
Pied flycatcher, great tit, redstart, field and house sparrows settle in titmouses, starlings, rollers, white wagtails, gray flycatchers live in birdhouses.
Why is it often titmice and birdhouses empty? What is the reason for the "unwillingness" of birds to settle in your garden?
The fact is that we often do not know the requirements of the birds that they impose on housing. At first glance, everything seems simple: I knocked down a box, made a hole in it, nailed it to a tree ... and the bird's "house" is ready. Birds don't live in it. They don't like him. What's the matter?
For houses, it is better to take a tes with a thickness of at least one and a half centimeters. Thinner boards are short-lived. They quickly warp and crack. Plywood is not at all suitable for these purposes: it does not hold heat well, delaminates, and transmits sound. Most birds don't like noise.
bird house must be firmly knocked down, without cracks: starlings and other birds do not tolerate drafts. The nest boards should be unplaned so that the bird can safely get to the notch.
Previously done at the houses gable roof. It's not obligatory. Such imitation of human dwellings only complicates the work. It is better and easier to make a roof without a slope and removable. It is possible from a croaker. Its area is so small that water will not linger on it, especially since when hanging houses, it always turns out to be tilted in one direction or another. It is desirable that he be forward. The roof, as we have already said, is better to make it removable, since the house itself needs to be cleaned periodically.
Sizes and colors of bird houses
insectivorous birds every year they make a new nest on the old one. Therefore, after a few years they "clog" the room with old nests up to the entrance. The removable roof should protrude 3-5 cm above the entrance.
Internal house dimensions, its height and taphole diameter. For a birdhouse, the bottom area should be from 12x12 to 16x16 cm; height from the bottom to the lid - 28-35 cm; notch diameter - 4.7-5 cm.
Recommended dimensions of the titmouse: bottom area 10x10 or 12x12 cm, height - 22-28 cm, notch - 3-4.5 cm. Great tit, pied flycatcher, blue tit, vertichoke, redstart, sparrows are "registered" in such a house. For smaller birds (Muscovites, Grenadiers, etc.), you need a house with an area of 8x8 or 9x9 cm, a height of 22-25 cm and a summer entrance - 3 cm. We must not forget that the distance from the entrance to the roof should be equal to the diameter of the entrance. This is for most birds.
In order for the birds to more readily inhabit the houses, they must be painted. Most birds prefer to settle in houses painted in green color, brown, yellow, red and black, but they do not like blue. Birds like to settle in unpainted houses, in which the front wall is made of unskinned croaker. In all likelihood, such nesting sites remind birds of natural hollows. old house the inside needs to be whitewashed.
Orientation of birdhouses, titmouses and other bird houses
Not less important take into account the orientation flight to the cardinal points. For pied flycatchers, east is preferable, for tits, west. Birds usually do not like the northwestern direction and avoid settling in such houses. The best flow direction for most birds is from the northwest to the southeast.
Some birds - starlings, sparrows - live in colonies. For them, nesting boxes can be hung side by side or on the same pole, setting the houses one above the other. Other birds do not tolerate the proximity of someone's nests. For pied flycatchers, for example, the distance between nests should be 15-20 m, for great tits - 40-60 m.
bird houses must be protected from cats. The pole on which the house is installed is upholstered with tin or visors are made on the branches.
If you want to protect your garden from pests, welcome birds. They are faithful, hardworking and kind helpers of man.
According to the magazine " household farm", N. Yurkin, 1982
