Green Machine Farm

This morning I noticed a bunch of small birds flitting about over the neighbors pond across the road.

After a while my curiosity got the better of me, so I walked down to the road to see if I could get a better look. They were still too small, too fast, and too far away to identify.
But I took a few shots with the telephoto lens.

Sure enough, blue bodies, white bellies, slightly forked tail. The tree swallows have arrived.
I hope they all stick around, build nests, and keep eating flies.

Encouraging these little birds to hang around is our form of Eco-friendly fly control.  Instead of treating our cattle with a broad-spectrum insecticide that kills beneficial insects as well as flies, we build birdhouses. Tree swallows eat flying insects, and a lot of them.  The beneficial insects, like dung beetles are unharmed, and through their natural dung-burying behavior, also help to reduce the number of flies.

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, I’ve been seriously rethinking the use of Rodenticides (Rat Poison) here on the farm.

Mice are a problem on most any farm. Any place you have a non-airtight building, like a barn, and lots of animal feed, you’ll inevitably have mice.

Rodenticides are all too often the go-to solution for controlling a mouse problem.  When we moved here to the farm there were buckets and buckets of rat poison in the barn and outbuildings.  Heck, the local farm supply mega-store has an entire aisle of the stuff.

The good thing about rat poison is that it works.  Mice die when they eat it.

The negative consequences, however, are harder to see.

Mice are regularly picked off by birds of prey, leading to poison building up in the bodies of the birds.  Barn Owls are particularly susceptible, with 70% in Canada, and 91% in the UK showing detectible levels of Rat-Poison in their bodies.  Is it any wonder that Barn Owls are said to be “extremely rare”, and in decline in Minnesota?

While Barn Owls are listed as a species of “Least Concern” by the folks that make up the Endangered Species List, their numbers have plummeted by 60% in North America from 1966 to 2002.

That’s a bit concerning.

So no more rat poison.

But what to do to keep all the little mouses under control?

How about trying to attract some of those voracious barn owls?  I mean, they’re too small to eat chickens and they eat the heck out of mice.  Sounds like a good fit.

It even looks like farmers used to be quite accommodating to barn owls, giving them free access to their barns (via Eulenloch, or “Owl Holes”) in exchange for their rodent-hunting prowess.

I’m not a huge fan of an open-barn-door policy.  I’ve already got a few pigeons that have taken up residence in the barn, and they make quite a mess.

How then to give the owls a place in the barn to nest, but keep the poop out?

I started out with a nice box.  About 12″ x 16″ x 24″ per the larger sizes of barn owl boxes.  I just made one out of random scraps of wood I had laying around the workshop.

Then the real fun begins.
Now it’s time to drill a big hole in the side of the barn. And way up high off the ground to boot.

No big deal, just climb 20 feet up an extension ladder and start drilling with a 4″ hole-saw. It’s difficult enough to handle a big drill and hole-saw on the ground. Doing it up on a ladder is…challenging. Taking pictures up there is challenging. It makes me have a purdy face.

Enlarge the hole with a reciprocating saw, and we’re ready to put up the box. First put some sort of bedding in the bottom of the box, apparently barn owls won’t go collect their own bedding for a nest, so it needs to be provided for them. I used a handful of straw.

Then there’s the small matter of carrying a heavy bulky box up a ladder and screwing it to the side of the barn with your one free hand. You do have a free hand don’t you?  Oh, and don’t fall to your death.  That would be bad.

I finished up by stapling some bird netting across both windows in the barn. There used to be glass in the windows, but as with a lot of things on the farm, it ain’t what it used to be.

So now the pigeons have been evicted, and we’ll keep an eye on the nest box to see if we can get any interested barn owls to show up and start munching on some mice.

I just finished reading “Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death” by Bernd Heinrich and found it to be quite interesting.  The book is mainly about the “undertakers” of the animal world, vultures, ravens, carrion beetles, and so on.  I have a lot of fun reading a book by a deeply knowledgable author like Bernd Heinrich because I so often get sidetracked by really interesting things that are only given a mention in passing.

In the book there were a few things that grabbed my attention, leading to hours of additional reading on Wikipedia.

Ever heard of a Giant Ichneumon Wasp?  Or seen one in action?  It’s pretty amazing stuff.

Anyway, one bit that really caught my eye centered on the plight of the white-rumped vulture.

The white-rumped vulture isn’t exactly a pretty bird, but it was a pretty important scavenger.  In fact, it may have been the most important (and certainly the most populous) scavenger bird in the entire Asian continent.

That was, of course, before 1992.

Fast forward 20 years, and the white-rumped vulture population has been decimated.  Only about 0.1% of their original population is alive today, earning them a “critically endangered” spot on the endangered species list.

What killed off the other 99.9% of the vultures?

A little painkiller called Diclofenac.

Diclofenac is an NSAID pain/fever reducer, much like Aspirin or Ibuprofen.  Diclofenac isn’t really a problem when it’s used by humans, because as luck would have it, not many people get eaten by vultures these days, Parsi’s notwithstanding.

But in Asia, Diclofenac started to be used in cattle.

When you’re a small farmer in Asia (as most farmers are) you don’t have much land to work with.  That makes it hard to support many cattle on your land, making each cow you have that much more valuable.  If your cow represents such a huge chunk of your net worth, it makes sense to treat it with pain medication if it’s having a rough time delivering a calf or getting lame in one foot.  That $1 spent on a drug like Diclofenac might just keep your cow alive, and keep you out of the poor house.

Unfortunately for the vultures, eating even tiny amounts of Diclofenac-tainted meat causes them to go into kidney-failure and die.  If as few as 1 in 720 cow carcasses are tainted with Diclofenac, the vulture population declines.

“So what?” you might say.  Vultures are kind of icky anyway, what’s the big deal if some of them die off?

Well, vultures turn out to be pretty important.  They have a real knack for disposing of carcasses, again, just ask the Parsi’s.

So when 99.9% of the vultures in a given area suddenly die, the carcasses really start to pile up.  Surely hundreds of wild animals and livestock die every day in a given area.  So what if no one or nothing is around to get rid of those remains?

Turns out, other animals step into the scavenger role.  Feral dogs for starters.  And with feral dogs comes rabies.  Is it any wonder that there are headlines like “Millions of stray dogs terrorize India.”?

And the dogs aren’t alone either.

A crafty predator like the Leopard would love to snack on a few feral dogs.  But a Leopard can’t live on dogs alone, they gotta have a little variety too!  So the leopards just snack on a few people here and there.

What a mess!

Diclofenac has since been banned for livestock use in India (it’s long been banned in the US).  And there are a few big efforts underway to repopulate the White-Rumped Vulture.

So while Diclofenac poisoning might stand as one of the worst ecological disasters in recent history, but at least people are starting to repair the damage.

But it does make me think twice about the potential effects of other chemicals that we use here in the US, like Rodenticides.

It finally warmed up a bit here.  The high temperature has been a few degrees above freezing almost every day this week.  The lows have even managed to stay above 10°.

Word on the street is that we might be getting a day or two with highs around 40°.

That’s shorts and T-shirt weather for all I’m concerned.

Spring can just hurry on up, I’m ready for it.

With that in mind, I got out and cut up a nice stack of lumber the other day.

It was high-time that I put together a few tree-swallow houses.

Four ought to get me started, or at least keep me busy for a few hours.

And then it’s out to tromp through the snow to find a place to hang them. It was even nice enough outside to drag the little munchkin and my lovely camera-wielding wife along with me.

A few screws later, and the boxes are up.

Comon’ spring, we’re ready.

I movd into my in-laws basement a few weeks ago after selling our house in Columbia.
Just outside the basement door, on one of the rafters supporting the deck, there is a barn swallow nest with three young barn swallows in it.

When I woke up this morning, there was quite a barn-swallow commotion going on outside. I peeked out the door, and the nest was empty.

Luckily, this was not a predator-commotion, it was a fledglings leaving the nest commotion. The whole family was perched atop a retaining wall a few feet away.

The parents quickly flew off when I appeared, but the little guys stuck around a while. Especially this one, I got within 2 feed of this fella before he wised up and flew off.

It’s haying season here in the midwest.  Hay mowers, rakers and balers dot the countryside.

I see plenty of trucks driving around with hay trailers in tow.

I like our hay trailer best, mainly because it’s also a flatbed trailer.  Just bolt on the three pipe racks that dad welded up, and you’ve got a hay trailer.

Load some hay.

And load some more hay…

It can get rather tricky pulling that much weight with a 2 wheel-drive truck, but Cinco is an expert driver.

Hank just waits for the tractor to come ’round, then begs a ride in the air-conditioned cab.

The tree swallows in the back field are multiplying rapidly. The five young ones from the last brood were watching us from the fence.

Meanwhile the adults were hanging out back at the nest, presumably getting ready to start the second brood of the year.
Tree Swallow nests are pretty easy to discern. About an inch and a half of grass with white feathers on top.

The Alfalfa in the CRP field looks a bit far gone.

But the Red Clover is holding up like a champ.

With all the birdhouses we’ve been building and installing around the farm, there have been precious few desirable birds trying to nest in them.

We quickly found out that we had a big problem.  A sparrow problem.

As I mentioned before, the European House Sparrow is a nasty little invasive species that likes to crowd out and even attack and kill our beneficial native species.

Every nest box we put up was quickly claimed by a male sparrow, and they quickly commenced stuffing the boxes full of their messy nest materials.  Every time we tore a sparrow nest out, they would build another one within 24 hours.  They were even nesting in the nooks and crannies of the new pole-barn.

What really pushed me over the edge is seeing the constant flow of sparrows in-and-out of the Eggmobile.  They were having quite a feast with the 30lb hanging feeder that the layers eat from.  I’m no fan of Sparrows, and I’m sure not paying to have them eat the chicken feed.

This all started the Great Sparrow War of 2012.

During the opening skirmishes the sparrows nested in every box they could find, and we tore out every nest we could find.  We were outnumbered and were being outflanked at every turn.

We decided to starve them out. We took away the chickens 30lb hanging feeder, and replaced it with this treadle feeder.

It’s totally closed off to any sparrows, rodents or other vermin.  It takes about 2lbs of force on the treadle to lift the lid and expose all those yummy layer pellets.

We thought we had dealt the sparrows a major blow, but the little buggers seemed unfazed. It was time for phase two. Trapping.
First up is the old trusty bait trap.

Then the newly constructed DRST-type repeating trap.

And for those pesky sparrows who just can’t take a hint, there is the in-box trap.

Installed like so it should trap any sparrow stupid enough to try to reclaim a nest after being evicted. One must be careful with these though, as you could easily catch a swallow or bluebird who’s looking for a home too.

The calves are keenly interested in the installation of an in-box trap. That or they think it’s dinner time.

So at current count we’ve eliminated around two dozen sparrows. There are more out there, of course, but the desirable native species have come back in a big way.
There are 3 barn swallow nests in the new pole barn.

The farm is just filthy with bluebirds these days (adults and juvenilles). And we’re even starting to see tree swallows out in the pastures. One box (the furthest one from the house) even has a tree swallow nesting in it!

So we already built plenty of Bluebird houses, good work!
But as we discussed earlier, bluebirds mainly eat bugs that are at ground level. So while that may work great for your garden, fields or high-tunnels, it doesn’t do much to keep all those flies off of your livestock.
To get those flies under control we need a different kind of bird.
We need swallows.

Swallows, at least where I’m from, come in two varieties. There are Barn Swallows and Tree Swallows.  They both eat a heap of flying insects, and they both feed right where we need them to, from 1-12 feet off the ground.

Now if you’ve ever been around a farm much, you’ve probably seen plenty of barn swallows.  They’re the little guys who build mud nests under the eaves of barns, houses, or any other building that suits them.  Short of building more barns, we’re going to have a tough time making more habitat for them, but I’ve got a few ideas that I want to try…later.

As for Tree Swallows, they are another cavity-nester.  This means that they just need a box with a hole in it to feel right at home. So lets make them feel welcome, shall we?

First, download the plans here.

Materials:

One 3′ x 1″ x 6″ Pressure Treated board (around $2 if you buy it 12′ at a time)

One 3′ x 1″ x 8″ Pressure Treated board (around $2.50 if you buy it 12′ at a time)

Thirteen 1.75″ Triple-coated Deck screws ( around $0.80)

So materials-wise, each house will set you back $5.30, not bad for all the flies you’ll be getting rid of!

Once you’ve got all the pieces cut out, let’s start putting them together!

First we attach the sides to the back board, leaving a gap up top for ventilation.

Next, attach the bottom, with three screws, one from each side, and one from the back.

Now we attach the front, with the scratched-up side facing in.  Secure it with two screws, at the top, so that it hinges out for hanging, cleaning and maintenance.  Make sure to pre-drill and/or countersink these two holes so that you don’t split the wood.

Some birdhouse designs use a “keeper nail” to keep the front shut, but I just make sure the screws are tightened up real good.  If I have trouble prying it open, then It’s tight enough that no gust of wind or predator is going to get it open.

And last but not least, put the roof on, and make sure it’s flush with the back edge of the house.  It should overlap each of the sides by about 1/8th of an inch.

Now go hang up all those birdhouses!  Tree Swallows are apparently fairly territorial (with other tree swallows) so keep the boxes 100 feet apart, and 6-7 feet off the ground.  Remember, that you probably want to put these boxes out in your pasture, so they’re out there eating all those flies that were bugging your livestock.  Keep them away from the house to minimize problems with house sparrows!

Ever since visiting Greg Judy’s farm I’ve been looking for a good set of birdhouse plans. And while the internet is filthy with birdhouse plans, I couldn’t find anything that I was in love with.

My criteria are pretty strict, and the bird enthusiasts out on them internets sure don’t seem to share the same criteria. For farm use, a birdhouse needs to be tough enough for a cow to scratch on it, quick and easy to build, and relatively cheap.  Preferably, the birdhouse should be unfriendly to Sparrows.

First, lets cover why we want bluebirds on our farm, and why we should build houses for them.

Bluebirds are a native cavity-nesting songbird. For farmers who grow crops for market, bluebirds can be a big help because their diet is mainly bugs.  More specifically, they eat bugs that crawl around close to the ground, like those on your plants.

As a cavity-nesting bird, they evolved to nest in hollow-cavities in trees.  Since we humans have a pretty universal habit of cutting down diseased and dying trees (ones likely to have cavities) we unintentionally eliminate a lot of bluebird habitat.  It’s only right that we should restore some of that habitat, however artificially.

We have to be careful though, birdhouses aren’t a set-it-and-forget-it proposition.  They need to be monitored in the spring and cleaned out every Fall.  Monitoring is especially important due to a ubiquitous and unpleasant invasive species: the European House Sparrow.  Sparrows will claim bluebird nest boxes and even kill bluebirds in order to take over a nest.  But the real big problem comes when you realize that Sparrows primarily eat grain and seeds.  So if left unchecked, you’re good insect-eating birds will be replaced by birds that will chow down on your livestock feed.

So with all that out of the way, lets build some birdhouses!

First, download the plans here.

Second, acquire the materials.  You’ll need:

• One 4′ length of 1″x6″ pressure treated lumber.
• One 1.375″ shoulder hook.
• Thirteen 1.25″ triple-coated deck screws

Next we’ll measure out the cuts (twice!) and make the cuts (once!)

Now to start on assembly.
First we’ll attach the sides to the back. Leave a little gap up top for ventilation.

Next we’ll attach the floor, leaving gaps on either end to let water drain out.

Then we’ll attach the roof, making sure it’s flush with the back of the birdhouse

Now for the tricky part, marking the holes to hold the front panel on. The holes should be 3/8″ from the bottom, and 3/8″ from the front. Countersink and/or pre-drill the holes to make sure the wood won’t split.

Now it’s time to attach the front. Only use two screws on the bottom edge, so it swings down for inspection and maintenance.

Now attach the perch to the front panel with two screws

And install the shoulder hook. The shoulder hook is this little “L” shaped fella here. When pointed down, it keeps the door shut, but turn it around and the door should open right up.

Before you know it you’ll have a bevy of bluebird houses, and they won’t break the bank either!  The materials should cost you a bit less than $3 per birdhouse.

Now just find a nice garden fencepost to hang them on (around 5′ off the ground) and keep them 300′ apart, as bluebirds are pretty territorial little critters.

With all your hard work finished, just sit back and watch those bugs disappear!