Hey everyone! Today, on garden fork. It is Christmas Day and I thought this to be a perfect day. Everyone is just kind of laying around and maybe, you want to do a little something. Or it is just the middle of winter and you want a project to do inside is to build bird houses for the spring time.
Bird houses, what they really are, are replacements for dead trees because the birds that are going to be in a bird house are called cavity nesters. And what happens, is like a woodpecker or an owl, will hollow out a dead tree and they will have their nest there, and then other birds will reuse that nest or reuse that cavity.
So bird houses, they can be very elaborate, or they can be very simple. But basically, what they are, they are a hole in a box. And the North Dakota Department of Environmental Protection has published online this really great PDF of simple bird house plans. And I have used it a bunch of times, I print it out for friends, and I am going to make it available to you guys too. If you go to the greenhouse, there will be a link to it. It is really cool. And they have a very simple bird house style; I call it the bough house bird house, very modular. You can make a simple blue bird bird house out of a one by six piece of pine. All right, hold on.
Okay, here we are down at the workshop. And we have our plans. This is by the way from the North Dakota Fish and Game Department, not the Department of Environmental Protection but they work hand in hand. Anyway, it is a really neat PDF you can download, and we have the plans for a blue bird house here, really simple and the pops might help.
You want to go to a lumber yard and get what is called a one by six which means a piece of common pine which is, nominally, one inch wide by six inches width. But in the modern day world, when you say one by six, what the piece of wood really is, it is three quarters by five and a half. But that when you go to the store and you say I need a one by six and they will know, what you want.
Oh! You can also just use scrap lumber too. I mean if there is a house nearby that is being built or if there is a renovation going, they are just throwing out a bunch of short ends, you can take a bunch of short ends of lumber and make bird houses as well. So that is super green too.
So, here we go, if all else fails, read directions here, really simple, we are just going to mark off a bunch of lengths here. This is my grandfather in law’s bird house; he took some coffee cans and just leaves the back like that. And he just cut a piece of plywood, the diameter of the top of the can, put a little perch on there, and it is a little wren house. It is really quite nice.
It is this. So we have our lines laid out on our wood now. You can use the simplest tools to make these houses. I am going to use my fancy compound minor saw. Or you can use a table saw, or you can just use a saw that you have lying around the house. I mean this is a miter box saw but you could use this or a regular cross cut saw. What I am trying to say is you do not need a lot of fancy tools to make this and you can make it with your kids and I think they like it.
Okay now, it is time to saw. Remember, always have ear and eye protection. You can take this from your Star Trek uniform. So in the front of the bird house, we have to make a hole for the birds and, they found through studies that an elongated hole works best. So we are going to use a simple saw called a coping saw to cut this in the front. You could also just use a flat bladed drill like a wood drill. One and one eighth is a good size for a blue bird’s chickadees and things like that. But I am going to make that elongated hole. I am going to show you how to do that.
Okay so take your drill, and you want a drill bit that is larger than your coping saw blade, just start right here. Now the beauty of the coping saw is you can disconnect it. So you take this, loosen this up, and that pops off like that. And then you feed the blade, through this hole here, and you put it back on, and here you go. Then you start sawing.
Okay now when I
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