Always. Nesting and fledging goes by pretty fast and Old Blush will still be there, when the baby birds have flown. But then you can provide it some support with a clean conscience and a warm glow.

In my line of business (which includes biological monitoring), you have to delineate a 50-foot-radius buffer around any songbird nest on a project site (don't even ask about raptors). Most birds are happy, however, if you just don't mess around with whatever tree or shrub they are in.

Debbie

Must be about 6-7 nests.

At my SIL's house, a great horned owl pair set up a nursery, and I saw pictures of when the babies (which at this point were huge) were standing out on a tree limb. Some tree guys hired by the nearby property owner showed up, and announced that they were going to "prune" the tree. My SIL ran out in her nightclothes to wave them off - she convinced them that the parent birds would attack them if they touched that tree, so they went away for a few weeks....

Jackie

Kristy, that's amazing. Are all those nests active and do you know who is using them? I have birds that nest in the same old place year-in, year-out, especially bush-tits: in the California dutchman's pipe, in the Alister Stella Grey, and in the pepper tree. You get quite an accumulation of those sock-type nests from years past.

Every year, also, I have to delay trimming/weeding near the bird house; this year the Bewick's wrens got it, but other years the oak titmouse or chestnut-backed chickadees have gotten it.

Jackie, bless your SIL! Even more frightening would be these four magic words: Migratory Bird Treaty Act. In accordance with that law, Chabot College in Hayward got a very hefty fine a few years back when their maintenance folks scraped barn swallow nests off the ceiling of a passageway (as they were being constructed by the birds). And in the case of raptors, like great horned owls, don't even ask!

Debbie

Interesting thread. A question for you, Debbie. I live in Mountain View and I've been pruning my two 'Mermaid' monsters. There are nests in there but they don't look active. Should I lay off the pruning, though, in case birds are looking around for good nesting places? For some reason, I become obsessed with pruning as much deadwood in the spring instead of in the winter when I should be pruning!

We put up our first bird box a few months ago and we are delighted to see it being used by chestnut backed chickadees.

Also, since we are on the subject, do birds prefer thorny roses such as Mermaid to nest in over smooth stemmed ones such as Lady Banks? My neighbor tells me that. He says its because predators can't get at the nests because of the thorns.

Thank you, Anne

Anne, congratulations on the chickadees, the cutest (and friendliest) of the cute.

Pruning dead wood now makes more sense than trying to prune it out when even the live canes look dead, I think. No harm in pruning if there's no activity around the nests, which there would be right now if they were being used. Many bird species don't use the same nesting places from one year to the next, or even salvage the materials. Other species build decoy or preliminary nests that never get used (bush-tits do this). In addition to watching the behavior of the birds, if there is a question, biologists use a mirror attached to an extension pole to check nests for eggs when the birds are away to see if they are seriously using a nest or just "hanging around".

Guidelines for creating habitat for birds frequently mention including thorny and/or dense shrubs to provide refuges from predators. Plus, from a "natural selection" point of view, it seems intuitive that birds nesting in thorny shrubs would be more likely to fledge offspring. On the Las Pilitas Nursery website, in the entry for Ribes speciosum (fuchsia-flowered gooseberry, as thorny as 'Mermaid', worse than barbwire, but I love it), the author talks about how the hummingbird lives in his for two months of the year, and can use the tufts of cat hair stuck on the spines to build a nest. Alister Stella Grey is dense and armed and no cat (or Cooper's hawk) goes there, for sure.

Debbie

Despite all of the large roses in my garden, the favorite place for nesting seems to be our enormous (10 ft by 15 ft by 12 ft) barberry bush. It has those amazing 2 inch long "Sleeping Beauty's Castle" type thorns. If they fall on the driveway, they can puncture a tire, as they come in a sort of 3 thorn array which means one is always up.

Last year, blue jays even nested there - their babies are awfully LOUD!

Jackie

Oh, I found a picture of the Great Horned Owl babies I mentioned above - aren't they cute?

Jackie

Oh, they are so cute. I don't have enough cover for owls, I think. Amazingly, a golden eagle was chased into our Siberian elm by a murder of crows. He had one of their comrades already dead. He paused for a few minutes in the tree while the crows cawed furiously in the nearby redwoods and my children and I raced around with our binoculars. Then he grabbed his crow which had fallen to a lower branch when he landed and took off followed by the upset crows. It was awesome. I've never seen such a large bird. And I was very surprised to see it in my suburban yard however briefly.

Thank you, Debbie. I was wondering about that also because my other neighbor thinks that thorny roses on our shared fence will keep rats from using it as a highway. This made me wonder about rats as nestling predators. I can see how a cat or hawk would be too large to get onto a big thorny bush but I'm not so sure about rats.

Anne

My New Dawn has been used by a mockingbird for the last three years as a nest site. and they are using it this year too. Looking at the thorns, it makes sense.

{{gwi:254276}}

kay

Oooh Jackie those owl babies are just adorable!

I love having birds nest on my property! We have a row of leyland cypress trees along our property line that are about 40ft tall and birds love nesting in them; esp the mocking birds. I also have 5 bird houses throughout the yard and just yesterday I noticed a couple are being used by bluebirds :)

Tammy

Great picture of owl fledglings, Jackie. Don't you love those cute little "horns" just beginning to stick up? We have a pair of great horned owls in our neighborhood, too, and you can often hear them calling during the night. They had owlets last year, one of which, sadly, was nabbed in the middle of the night by some predator (fox? coyote?). I heard its demise, and a parent owl called for hours afterward -- heartbreaking. Here is a picture of one of the parents from a few weeks ago, late afternoon, still napping, in a neighbor's eucalyptus (eucs and raptors go together like ham-and-eggs in California). I'm sure they are doing another nest this year.

Debbie

Kay, I had a New Dawn when I lived in Massachusetts. Training it always involved a blood donation -- those mockingbirds are so smart! ~ Debbie

One year, before I was bird nesting savvy, I was trimming some hedges in the front while ignoring the clicking Brown Thrasher. I spotting something in the bush and saw it was two fluffy brown chicks. Luckily I did not harm them with the hedge clipper. Now I do my hedge clipping early and then late in the season.

We once had a mockingbird make a nest in our Golden Showers that climbs up our porch. Unfortunately it was near where we like to sit on the porch. We avoided it for a bit, but after awhile the mocking bird tolerated us and even let us feed worms to the babies.