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Oops. I skipped your other issue.
EABL will toss eggs, as will most any other bird if they want a nesting place. It could have been him but there isn’t really any way to be certain.
Gin
Atlanta, GAAs the others have said, it is very hard to deal with nature in the wild. I agree that the initial pierced eggs sound like a House Wren I had that experience twice last year and saw it once. The second egg removal sounds like the new male might have done it. I also had that happen last year after the male lost his first female. I never saw them removing the 4 eggs but they were gone and she started laying a new brood. That was the one the wren got. I took the box down, cleaned it out and put it aside until this spring. I didn’t have this forum and the information about the wren guard last year that I could have used to keep the box up.
David
Stafford, VAOnce again, thanks for the responses. The saga continues. A couple of days after the eggs were tossed, I found some sticks inside the house. So I’m assuming the HOWR was the culprit. I tossed the sticks. The day after I found two tiny sticks and a leaf inside. I’m pretty sure I heard the HOWR chirping. I never any sign of the male wren on the box. Yesterday all was quiet. Today a bluebird pair visited the box and the male has been perched on the roof.
I’m fine making a wren guard, but I don’t want to invite catastrophe. What do you people think? I assume the wrens give up after they’ve nested elsewhere.
(As an aside, I’ve had house wrens in the past. Not every year by any means. Actually most years have been wren free. Since I have no TRES this year, can anyone in the northeast tell me whether they’ve fledged already? It’s been my belief that the TRES have kept all but the wicked house sparrows at bay. )
I don’t know if wrens ever give up during nesting season. If you want to leave the boxes up, you should turn or relocate them to make finding the entrance harder.
Do you know for sure what they sound like? https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/House_Wren/sounds
Gin
Atlanta, GAGin,
I’m almost certain I know what they sound like, and I heard that trill again this morning. A little later a wren landed on the box, poked his head in one of the ventilor holes, and then scooted on in the entrance.
I’ve opened the box. The door is hanging down. So that’s that. 😕
Diddo the get them as far from brush as possible.
The best precaution against HOWR is to locate the box more than 30 m away from any shrubs (I know not always possible in small lots). HOWR love shrubs. I found a study that showed boxes within 20 m were almost guaranteed top have some sort of HOWR interference at some point, and HOWR usually nested within that 20 M zone (no boxes were IN shrubs for this study) but that the further from shrubs the boxes were placed the less “interference”. eggs were pieced in boxes placed 20 to 30 m from shrubs but no HOWR nesting occurred. 30 m seemed to be the distance after which there was no “incursions”. This is generally similar to what I am seeing with the boxes I’ve placed in parks. Its just one study but certainly worth keeping in mind. If you can then place the box further than 30 m from shrubs, can save huge amounts of stress for you.The study also found that the EABL preferred to nest around 30 m away from trees (chose the boxes first in the study) so it works out well for the blues to have boxes away from the shrubs.
Can’t find the article at the moment but it is online somewhere…was focused on TRES but had HOWR and EABL included. (I love that they did not just throw out all the data related to non-target birds! So valuable!)
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