Texas Gardening: Where do your Bluebirds nest?, 0 by rouxcrew

rouxcrew wrote:
I have purple martins as well, Terri. We did the same thing, just put up a standard martin house one winter and here they came. I was told to put it up in December so that they would see it and would remember at nesting time. You also should take it down at a certain time, can't remember that, which is why we end up with sparrows in it. We usually take it down early fall and clean out the nest materials, collapse the pole, and put it back up around now. I have to buy a new pole for the one on the saw horses.
Oh, you need to put it out in the open for martins and put it up high. They don't do woods apparently.
We have house sparrows that nest in our bunkhouse porch supports, right at the roof. Doesn't bother us, in fact, we have a pair nesting now in the middle of winter. Wait is it spring? Or summer? With this weather who knows?
I have over 20 bird houses that I have collected over the years, mostly old ones that I find at sales and repair. The sparrows commandeer a few, but we do have other birds come and go.
The way I understand it, there is a hole size, location, position and type that attract certain species and repel others. Like BB houses. And we know how that works for me, all my BB houses stay empty.