Wayne et al.

I hope your chickadees provide you with as much joy as ours have. We've had
a chickadee birdhouse operating for about 8 years, with two or three broods
each year. The house sits 10' above the ground atop a pole about 2-3" in
diameter. We can observe the activity from the main floor of our house, but
it's at eye level from our second-floor bedroom. We've done some
modifications to the house. Although the entrance to the house was
advertised as being the correct size for chickadees, we narrowed it to about
1.25" diameter to keep starlings, house sparrows, et al. from snooping--or
worse. We also removed the dowel perch from below the entrance, as they just
fly right into the hole. This winter the pole rotted out so we replaced it
with a young trunk of bitter cherry. That's working well so far. When we had
the house down recently we took a peek at the nest. It was pristine--soft,
cozy, and made entirely from hair. Imagine the effort it took to find and
assemble all those random bits of hair. We were concerned we might have
waited too long to get the house back up, but a few days after setting it
up, the chickadees took up occupancy and have been busy ever since.

Janine Anderson and Terry LeLievre
Seattle