One of the property owners adjoining me decided he would plant a fence along the property line demarcating our parcels. After pounding in a few far-flung treated-wood corner posts, the fencing process languished and then stopped entirely.
Speaking
to my neighbor later, he told me he’d opted out of that fence location. Shortly
after our conversation, a fence appeared along his access road south of the
posts he’d previously planted.
One
of these rather lonely posts can be seen from my bay windows and has been
greeting my southward gazes for about two years. It recently occurred to me
that the post might make a good home for another neighbor: the bluebirds.
I’ve
decided to affix a bluebird box to that post, and two others in different
locations.
Bluebird
boxes on fence posts make excellent sense because fence lines already function
like avian boulevards. Mountain Bluebirds, in particular, spend much of their
day perched low, scanning open ground for insects with the concentration of
snipers. A fence post gives them both a lookout tower and a ready-made nesting
site in one neat package.
Here
in Montana, bluebirds favor our swaths of open country: pastures, hay fields,
ranch land, and any grassy edge where they can swoop down after beetles and
grasshoppers. A nest box mounted on a fence post in the open prairie places the
home exactly where they already make their living.
It
would be a shame to let a good post go to waste.
—Mitchell
Hegman
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