What I’ve found is that small birds will use them during the day and night for shelter and perhaps protection but don’t build nests in them. My own inquiry found that the hole at the halfway point is too far down. Birds won’t build nests where their babies can accidentally fall out during the ‘infant’ weeks.

In response, I’ve been placing the hole at the top now like the barn and cliff swallow nests. The babies can’t fall out untill they reach flying size now. As well, I’m grouping the houses together in clusters of 8 – 12 because these smaller birds are flock nesters and like to live in village groups.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we can work with the birds of the world by building them lodgings, as indigenous peoples have done for millenia. The birds plant highly productive food trees, shrubs, herbs and other species in profusion. The birds as well eat insects by the millions thus keeping river, lake and wetland community sites clear of insects for human habitation and health. Birds and orchard trees are the key to the waterside communities that indigenous peoples have lived in for tens of thousands of years.

If people collaborate with birds and other wildlife species by delegating habitat and sometimes assisting with habitation, then we can replant earth’s productive food orchard and reverse the seemingly irreversable expansion of deserts. Deserts are according to decades of study by the United Nations, the result of human agriculture. Agriculture is only 1 percent as productive as orchard culture (95% solar photosynthesis) because of the reduced solar photosynthesis of 2 dimensional field crops (5% photosynthesis as well as the reduced field crop root penetration (inches or feet) compared with Orchard (tens to hundreds of feet) of pumping water, mining minerals and forming nutrient colonies.

People are a keystone species, traditional planters and keepers of the orchard upon which the earth depends.

Douglas Jack