Choosing Bird Nest Boxes For Your Garden

Helping the birds and encouraging them in your garden is a win-win. Not only will you be able to feel good about helping the wildlife, you will also get a helping hand with keeping down garden pests such as slugs, snails and insects. Furthermore, birds will help to spread seeds and will improve the general biodiversity of your outside space. Fortunately if is easy to encourage birds by providing them with food and water and by choosing bird nest boxes for your garden.

Over recent years, 'novelty' nest boxes have been increasingly popular. Unfortunately, while they may look cute, plastic, ceramic and metal nest boxes in all sorts of fun shapes do little for the birds. These different materials often do not provide enough warmth or will cause baby birds to fry inside on a hot day, as is the case with metal-roofed boxes, which easily overheat. Ceramic designs are poorly

insulated, so may range to sharply in temperature to keep baby birds comfortable. Plastic and metal nest boxes are the worst since they can also encourage condensation to form on the inside, which can cause baby birds to get ill or even die from damp and cold.

Unfortunately, the bright colours often employed on these novelty so-called nest boxes, and even on wooden ones, also pose a danger to the birds within. The RSPB and others have warned that brightly coloured nest boxes can attract the attention of predators and make it more likely for a nest to be ransacked and all the birds lost. For some species of birds that are endangered, every loss is a huge disaster. We as gardeners do, obviously, care about what our gardens look like. But we should care more about what they do and the wonderful things that we can achieve in them.

Unusual designs may make your garden look good, but choosing bird nest boxes should be about getting it right for the birds, not about aesthetics, keeping up with the Joneses or outdoing your neighbours. Choose a good, traditional design in wood. Not only are these bird boxes best for the birds, they also look good in your garden and are a sustainable material. There is a reason why these designs endure – they work.