Sunday, April 1, 2012

Bluebirds Benefit from Cascading Good Fortune, Part 1

Our good fortune in having a neighbor who is also a expert painter has cascaded over into other parts of our lives: namely - our passion for creating hospitable spaces for nature. In other words, because we are getting incredible help on our house, we now have more time to help critters.

Our most recent project has been building bluebird houses and associated predator guards. This post covers how we made the latter.

You can buy predator guards (extremely expensive, if you buy good quality) or make them out of PVC pipe (but this material photo-degrades, gets brittle and then can crack and shatter). We therefore decided to use heating duct, which is pretty inexpensive, readily available and will out-last most other materials (plus it will weather nicely).

So, here's how to do it.

 Take a short section of steel duct...



....snap it together in the customary way...


...pop-on an end cap...



....using pop-rivets, permanently attach end cap to duct...


....using a jigsaw with a metal-cutting blade, cut a hole in the top so that the fencepost this will be installed on can extend through....


....drill holes to accommodate wire (which will hold predator guard to fencepost)...



...snake the wire through the holes...


...repeat process until you end up with as many as you need! Part 2 will be making the bluebird boxes!


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