Beginning with the raptors (birds of prey) in March and culminating in Warbler Season in May, and then again from August through October, birds face an incredibly dangerous journey, flying between their summer nesting territory and their winter residences.
It’s always been dangerous for reasons related to weather and predation, but with the conditions imposed by us, it’s now a gauntlet. First we had the advent of guns and market hunting that, two centuries ago, began wiping many out. In the last century alone, communications towers and hydro lines and glass buildings and habitat loss and so on have amounted to Billions of birds lost.
The other day, I watched a documentary by New Hampshire Public Television on bird migration. I learned a few startling facts about habitat loss and other pressures that decimate bird populations. Most alarming of all was that birdmortality while migrating is as high as 85%. I doubt that’s due to hurricanes and low seasonal food, though these are real risks that birds have always faced. I’m sure that most are due to human activity:
Building and tower lights on at night throwing birds off course, exhausting and killing them. Birds migrate at night, and the light of the moon used to guide them. Now, our overlit cities and buildings misguide them.
Bird strikes on power and cellular telephone infrastructure — guy wires and towers also are responsible, it’s not just wind turbines.
Critical habitat loss on migration routes. Birds need to land and feed, timed with their food source according to the season and weather, before proceeding north (or south) again.
Bird strikes on buildings, now more than ever. Glass architecture is killing millions of migratory birds. And it’s not just big buildings! An individual home may only be killing a handful of birds a year, but there are so many homes out there that those numbers really add up quickly.
And the grand winner: Our pet and feral cats are the biggest killers by far. Do not underestimate the carnage that your sweet kitty causes. It’s not good fun. If you absolutely insist on putting your cat outdoors – you’re wrong, but still – do it only at night, when birds are in flight. During the day, they need to come down and search for food, water, and rest. They need it. The cat’s just playing. (So put a BirdBeSafe collar on kitty!)
I decided not to present this post as a project, because I highly doubt anyone other than me has a garden shed that they’d want to reconfigure. Though if you do, reusing the wood is a good thing, and it can give you a head start on the structure. You can always mix-and-match, so long as it looks good and is functional. Enjoy!
I’ve had the garden shed since I bought the house, and it’s moved around some, such as on the patio (as seen in my wildlife visitors post) and elsewhere. Here it is as it was for years, at the back of the garden.
So after 18 years, it was high time I did something to refurbish the shed. I wanted something a little more appealing with a bit more capacity. I also wanted to reuse the wood, and use some of my stockpile to boot.
To begin with, it was 8 fence-boards wide and 3 fence-boards deep. It had two internal shelves, and it didn’t hold all that much.
The contents
8 * 3 = 24 sq units (units being the width of a fence board), so take two off the width and add them to the depth: 6 * 5 = 30 sq units. This called for a little more height to the front, as the sides were already on an angle for the roof, and I had the boards to make the extension. So that’s a nice way to increase not just the square footage, but the volume.
I changed it from a double-door to a single-door – this would give it an “outhouse” appearance, and I love that. There was ivy clinging to the door, and I didn’t want to kill the ivy, but change where it was clinging in the next growing season. So I worked around the ivy as best I could.
It actually took a bit of time (a couple of days) to bang all the parts together in a way to make it not only fit (doors must hang properly and close completely!) but be just as solid, if not even more solid, than before.
First challenge: the roof
Then I had to get creative and comb through my various materials to strategize how to make a roof for it. Otherwise, I’d have to buy materials, either new or used, and that would not be convenient.
Luckily, I had:
bits of trellis frame I’d deconstructed, for edge-strips
some OSB (oriented-strand board, a weatherproof structural material for houses) I could fit together as the roof base
some tar paper to cover the base, and
tin tiles to shed water off the roof.
I also reappropriated two old shelf braces to tie the roof down to the top frame on the inside of the shed.
Clever shelving
I’d reused the one broad shelf across the back, and made another broad shelf on the right side, with a corner notch cut off so that it wouldn’t obstruct the door. The top frame (in the deconstruction pic, above) was left almost as-is. It has several screws on which cords and things can hang, just like on the back of the door.
I only had three full floor boards, but in the gap at the back, I placed an old camper sink and a bin containing supplies. Both objects drain, so should any water manage to get in, it won’t be standing for very long.
Bonus: the grid wire just so happens to lie flat for storage. Bags of garden supplies now go here.
Finally, I got the idea of a drop-in / tip-up shelf to fit the bottom frame, so it could hold even more stuff (and be taken out if needed). I basically used off-cuts pinned to a backing bar, dropped in place. It looks like a xylophone, but it gives room to the shovels and stuff at the left. Brilliant, and practical.
Finishing the cabin
After I was done building it (and making sure it was perfectly positioned), I filled all the old screw holes with putty. This needed curing for several weeks before applying primer and paint, so I left it spotty like that over the winter.
Later, I showed pics of this project to a friend’s dad. He told me that the “Z” used on wooden doors has to have a certain orientation. Gravity pulls down on the free top corner of the door, so the Z transfers the force to the bottom hinge. This prevents the door from sagging over the long term. Once you see this, you can’t unsee it! So I made the change – compare pic #1 with one of the door pics above:
As soon as I had a nice spring day for painting, I primed the cabin, and then painted its front and its edges a nice blue. I cut two pieces of lattice I had left over from an old fence, framed them, and put them on both sides. That way, the ivy from the door and other plants have a place to climb.
I painted a second coat of blue so that it would look good for a long time, and that’s pretty much that.
One feature you can’t see is a 2×4″ fixed to the back of the cabin on a slope. Its purpose is to lean up against the fence so that the cabin doesn’t slump (TBH, it does look leaning forward, but then so is the whole picture: the horizon isn’t straight). The rain drips off the roof onto the 2×4, and then rolls down slope to drain off the side. There’s a channel notch chipped out to assist with that.
I love my new shed and I’m pleased I got to use up old scrap wood in such a purposeful way. And at the same time, I re-installed the clothesline after going a few years without it. Finally, you can see the squirrel highway (the remains of a former fence) along the fence to the right. What a great back yard, if I do say so myself!
I thought I’d already talked too much here about bird strike prevention, but I recently reviewed what I had, no, I haven’t, really. It’s show-and-tell time!
It’s especially time, because I’ve exhorted people to fix their windows for ages. You still don’t see it on regular homes, but sometimes you do on new construction, with the artistic appearance of large windows on buildings.
For a number of years now, shops and even bus shelters have had a printed wrap treatment. This is where a company applies a print-decorated, perforated material (paint or plastic) to the windows so that people see images and text when they look at the building. Inside, the printing dims the daytime glare while letting the light in, providing a fine screen through which to view the outdoors. This exact treatment also happens to be visible to birds and prevents bird strikes! YAY!
One reason every day homeowners – house and condo, whether duplex or triplex-style – haven’t yet taken the same step is because 1) they still don’t know about it, 2) it’s not common, 3) it takes a little effort, which means excuses get in the way, and 4) people [used to] fear looking “weird.”
Image source unknown, of a cat lounging at a decorated window
The thing is, people now know enough about the issue, and we see these decorative windows around enough, that they’ll approve of this weird thing you do. It’s not weird anymore!
Doing the thing: bird proofing ALL my windows
So now I’ll actually show you the results of these extra steps you need to take (and then your neighbour will take, and then the office building ought to to take, and all developers town councils need to take). Because I’m the weirdo who shows people what works (and says so, if it doesn’t).
In 2012 I wrote about the skunk that took up residence in my yard (good), and this post here has been up since around that time. Now, twelve years later, it was due for a significant expansion, so here we are. Gosh, I love animals!
I love having garden visitors of any kind, but there’s a special charm when they’re the non-human kind. Their presence in my back yard gives both me and my human guests feelings of wonder and peace, with the occasional bout of excitement.
A surfeit of skunks, whee!
I’ll start with everyone’s favourite trash panda:
Raccoons
These two young raccoons spent the day snoozing in the tree overhanging my backyard. Right around that time, on an evening close to midnight, I heard a sound out back: a young, healthy raccoon raided the eggshell supply that I keep to mix with the bird seed (or dig into the garden). He (or she) also pulled down the pet laundry that I’d folded on the park bench. He seemed to like rubbing his paws all over the towel, so that was fun! Then, he ate some stuff in the garden – leaves, slugs, who knows.
So I fetched a midnight snack myself. I started on some yogourt while watching him, when he fixed his eyes on me in that dim, myopic way raccoons have, and came up to the patio door to poke his nose into the screen: “Got some food for me?”
Way back in 2011 when I was a beginning birder, I visited Point Pelee National Park for the first time. I wrote a trip report for the group I’d joined. They didn’t end up publishing it, and though I was free to do, I didn’t manage to get around to it — or if I did, it was an afterthought that went away while merging my old website to this one here in 2016. However, I did keep the Point Pelee Pictorial post from my trip there in 2013, and I recently revisited it.
In the intervening years, it’s only had 14 views, some of them surely my own. It also was of a lower quality than I’d like to have thought worth sharing, even given the evolution of expectations and image technology since then. So I just gave it a solid update—because a trip report is practically irrelevant of when it actually happens; what you see is timely for the place and the season.
Every year, migrating birds come in to Point Pelee between April and June, and depart through there again in September. The difference in the place visited is whether people build (or close) a trail, renovate a park building, how much the trees grow, how the vegetation and water ecology shifts, how the roads degrade with disuse and frost heaves and plant life that break them up. Like this, which is not a picture of a river, but of a former road, perhaps from before it became a National Park:
When this announcement has served its purpose, I’ll add this image of the re-naturalizing road (from 2011) into the Point Pelee Pictorial.
Upshot: I compiled my 2011 trip report into the 2013 blog post, and added the 2013 Big Day birding list (new information to the blog!), so it should actually be an interesting read for you now. So please, check out my Point Pelee Pictorial blog post — and make your own plans to go there for either this September’s fall migration, or next May’s spring arrival.
This is a long-running “lifestyle” blog about the pleasures of living like a farm kid in an urban context. You’ll find a wide range of topics that pertain to food, crafts, energy efficiency, and DIY. There’s a big focus on ecology and wildlife because this has brought me a lot joy – but this is also the greatest potential we have of restoring some balance to nature where we live.
Given that, I’ve turned my attention to providing more content for people to switch traditional lawns over to native landscaping and green driveways and things that will support climate readiness, drought and flood-prevention, and increased habitat for biodiversity. Comments and questions are welcome!
If you’re in the Montreal region, you can also use my “Rewilding” service to landscape your property using native plants, convert to a green driveway, and prevent your windows from killing birds.
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