A birdhouse by any other name would squeak, not peep

Go ahead, call it a birdhouse if you want to.

But you’d be wrong.

Oh, it looks like a birdhouse: It’s a small square wooden structure, about the size of a half-loaf of bread. It has a peaked tin roof and a small round hole in the front with a wooden peg jutting out an inch or so beneath it, just the kind of peg you would expect a bird might perch upon. It stands outside in the garden atop a wooden pole thrust into the ground.

But it’s not a birdhouse.

Take it to foreign lands, both primitive and advanced. Show it to any other human being on the planet, even humans as young as three years old or so. They would agree with you. “Birdhouse,” they would say, in whatever language they might speak there.

But they would be wrong, too.

It’s not a birdhouse.

I know it isn’t, despite what you all think.

The final authority—the birds—would agree with me. I know they would, although I don’t speak “bird” any more fluently than you do. If I did, I guess I would ask them why none of them have ever chosen to move into the little structure, not even after ten years or more of standing in what might be considered a prime location in the garden.

So that would be one reason why I would disagree with you that it’s a birdhouse. It’s a little bird-sized house, sure. But it has never been home to a bird, and seemingly never will.

When my wife and I bought it more than a decade ago, we thought it would make an ideal wren house, with its doorway too tight for sparrows or any other small bird to squeeze through. We placed it low on a pole, because wrens—unlike most other birds—have no objection to roosting close to the ground, where they do most of their foraging for insects.

But we got no takers that first year. Or the second.Or any other year since.

We have three or four other similar wren houses around the house that have all hosted families of wrens, year after year. They may not all be occupied every year, but they rarely go more than a year without occupants. Sometimes twice in a breeding season.

But not this little house—that apparently isn’t a bird house at all, if you ask the birds about it.

To the wrens’ credit, it may be our fault that they haven’t chosen to roost there. After all, it does stand pretty close to another house that the wrens favor almost every year. It may be that they just don’t like living so crowded together.

Or it may be that we have placed it too close to the clematis vines that grow so thick that the little house is pretty much buried by late summer. But in early spring, when the wrens build their nests, the vines are just starting their slow climb up the wall toward the wee house. The babies would be well out of the nest by the time they heard the rustle of approaching leaves.

Do wrens plan that far in advance when they go house-hunting? Who knows?

Or it may be because I have let the little house fall into a state of disrepair over the years, neglected because of its purposelessness. The corrugated tin roof had become detached from one side, leaving a gap of about an inch. Enough to discourage a fussy wren, probably.

That’s why I finally decided to pull it up from the ground, repair it, and move it to another more spacious location, just to see once and for all if the little house ever had any chance of becoming a birdhouse.

I picked a spot on the other side of the yard, where my wife and I had pulled out a huge old-world rose bush that had come to dominate that neighborhood of the garden. With the rose gone and the surrounding area cleared of brush and vines that had crept like a jungle beneath and behind it, the airy landscape cried out for a wren house.

I carried the little house to that side of the yard and drove its pole into the ground, shaking, wiggling and pushing it until it was deep and sturdy enough to resist strong winds. And then I went to the garage and got a few screws and my portable battery-operated drill, driving the corrugated tin roof tight against the framework.

When I was finished drilling I took the tiny house in both hands, turning it so it faced just right, hopeful that it might now become, at last, a birdhouse.

And that’s when I discovered a second reason why it wasn’t a birdhouse, beyond the simple reason that no bird had ever wanted to live in it.

Because as I held the house in both hands, a tiny black-eyed face poked out of the doorway-hole.It was a deer mouse that had been inside the house through the whole noisy, tumblyendeavor. He gazed at me with a look that seemed to say, “Hey, do you mind? The kids are trying to sleep.”

And then, having had his say, the face disappeared back into the hole.

The little not-a-bird-house on the pole now stands back where it has stood for the past decade, right next to the clematis vines, where—though it may not be the ideal neighborhood for the uppity wrens—it seems to be the perfect address for a cute little mouse house to stand.

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