It's late summer and it's a perfect time for me to clean out the bird houses in my yard.

Birds that visit your backyard are sometimes cavity nesters and sometimes not.

Depends on the species.

So birds like Eastern Bluebirds or Black-capped Chickadees or Northern House Wrens are all nesters who build inside a cavity whether that's a tree hole or a box that you provide.

Many of our backyard songbirds like Cardinals and Blue Jays and American Goldfinches never nest in cavities, but at the end of the nesting season it's a good idea if you've had birds nest in any of your bird houses to give them a clean out.

It'll help next year's birds get a fresh start.

Some houses are easier to clean than others.

So come with me as we clean out the birdhouses in my backyard.

First up is a Gilbertson style Eastern bluebird box and it's made from PVC pipe.

If it's not a house that you're familiar with, it is a style that is often recommended by bluebird specialists.

People who really take care of bluebird trails or bluebird nesting box trails.

And that tubular shape.

Helps to deter house sparrows from nesting inside.

House sparrow are a non-native species and they often attack eastern bluebirds as they compete for nesting cavities and this style of house may help to reduce the pressure by the house spARROWS.

It's really easy to clean because it's I just simply squeeze that PVC tube which releases two little notches at the top of the feeder or at the top of birdhouse.

And then I can slide that PVC tube down and then simply dump out the nest.

Notice that the Eastern Bluebird makes a nest exclusively of grass.

Very rarely are there any other foreign materials or even feathers inside the nest so it's pretty easy to clean out.

Let's go find another box.

So this one is hanging under my eave of our chicken pen and it's a nest box that often attracts house wrens.

But a couple of things I noticed already, the hole has been enlarged probably by downy woodpeckers who often have this insatiable urge to carve out wider holes anytime they see a hole in a tree or.

Nest box in this case.

When I open it up, check this out, I see a nest here of fine materials.

Looks like little rootlets and quite a bit of moss.

This lets me know that a black cap chickadee at least tried to nest in here.

I don't know that it was successful, but the type of material in here.

Is easily scraped out at the end of the season.

I can kind of dust out any dust in there.

And some folks actually use a spray bottle of diluted bleach, like a 10 parts water, one part bleach solution, and then spritz the inside of the box to kind of kill any bacteria or things that might be in there, so this one I'll have to decide.

Do I wanna put an overlay on there to kind reduce that hole?

To make it small, or maybe I'll just leave it as it is.

I've got a red house here, again, a fairly small box, and I mentioned that it's nice, that some birdhouses are really easy to clean, like that Gilbertson style.

Some take a little bit more effort.

That chickadee nesting box, simply I just like turned that little nail and flipped open the front.

This one's gonna require some tools.

So this wren house is held together by Phillips head screws so I can simply open up the bottom or sometimes I open up to the top and pull out the nest that's in here.

And you can see this one is really packed.

House wrens make hundreds of trips into their nest boxes with tiny little twigs, tiny little stick.

Sometimes they'll use some little strips of plastic, but it's really kind of a struggle to pull some of this out.

You can see inside there are some feathers.

I've got a backyard flock of chickens, so sometimes they use that.

There's spider webbing in here, and there are even what look to me like house wren feathers.

So a real mix in here.

I see some arborvitae needles, the flat needles of arborvidae.

So really, really dense.

And every time I clean out one of these nests, I think, wow, all those trips.

And the male often makes multiple nests and then the female chooses which house, which cavity and which nest she would like to occupy.

So, this one actually cleaned out pretty quickly.

Which is great.

I'll probably give it a little swish of bleach and then hang it back up.

And that reminds me, I do leave birdhouses up through the winter because especially birds like downy woodpeckers and white-breasted nuthatches, when it's very cold, will go into a nest box to roost at night.

So it does provide some winter shelter for some of our backyard songbirds.

By far the hardest nesting box or nesting facility that I have to clean in my yard is this gem.

It's a gourd that was given to me by my friend Anne, and she had a young person paint this and carve a little hole in it that is the perfect size for a house wren, and the house wens love it.

Two brews were successful in this container this spring, But to clean it, there's no access port.

So it takes me a good 20 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes to shake out the material and pull out all the little twigs.

And every time I do, I think, okay, this is really hard to clean, but the house friends love it.

So when you're purchasing birdhouses, keep that in mind.

You do probably want one that's fairly easy to clean unless you want to spend some extra time.

Doing the cleaning.

This nest material, I pulled out most of it, but look at this.

Up close you can see again lots of feathers and I see a little bit of plastic and I also found this very tiny egg and that egg is the egg of the house wren.

And maybe that one didn't hatch.

Can't really tell, it doesn't look like it hatched.

So maybe that was an unsuccessful egg, but the rest of the brood perhaps hatched, and again, this is one nest box that I will take inside for the winter, primarily because it's hand painted and I would like the colors to stay nice and neat.

Your wood boxes though, you don't need to paint those.

They can be natural just like the nesting cavities that birds find or carve out in trees, so no need to paint your nest boxes.

Do keep them clean so that next spring all your birds are ready to go, ready to move in for raising their young in the spring.

Remember you can find your own outdoor elements when you visit area parks and natural areas.

We'll see you soon.