On Fri, 5 Jun 1998, Charles Evans wrote:

> In my yard, House Sparrows have built nests in two bird houses
> designed to allow Violet Green Swallows to nest but to exclude House
> Sparrows. One of the houses has an openning on the front that measures
> 3 1/2 inches wide and 1 inch vertically, with rounded corners. The other
> has a 1 1/2 inch round entrance on the bottom of the house. There is a 10
> degree slope upward from back to front on the bottom. One more detail:
> the entrances in both houses pass through a board 3/4 inch thick and the
> margins of the entrances are rounded. The houses were purchased at the
> Seattle Audubon Society office and were made commercially.

Hi Charles,

I'm afraid the entrance holes to those houses are too large. I have had
luck where the top to bottom dimension is only 7/8 of an inch. Here's a
couple of entrance designs that work.

1) By Gene Derig of Anacortes, a flat 3 1/2" wide diamond where the height
is only 7/8."

2) An oblong 2" wide where the height is only 7/8."

With a 7/8" wood drill you could model one of these entrances and perhaps
cover the entrances to the houses you bought.

Check out the VGSW house page I put up on the Web last year. It's linked
from the Cascadia Links page.

http://weber.u.washington.edu/~dvictor/VGSWhouse.html

Good luck,

Dan Victor, Seattle, WA <dvictor at u.washington.edu>
Cascadia Birding Links= http://weber.u.washington.edu/~dvictor/other.html