WRENS COMING!

by NELTJE BLANCHAN

of Oyster Bay, Long Island, NY, Doubleday, copyright 1917 BIRDS WORTH KNOWING: A book from our grandmother Myrtle Dix of Cedar Falls Iowa’s library, she a charter member and bird-bander of the National Audubon Societies, who taught us to gently handle and love birds.

" Early some morning in April there will go off under your window that most delightful of all alarm-clocks – the tiny, friendly house wren, just returned from a long visit south. Like some little mountain spring, that having been imprisoned by winter ice, now bubbles up in the spring sunshine, and goes rippling along over the pebbles, tumbling over itself in merry cascades, so this little wren’s song bubbles, ripples, cascades in a miniature torrent of ecstasy. The song seems to bubble up faster than he can sing. After the wren’s happy discovery of a place to live in, his song will go off in a series of musical explosions all day long, now from the roof, now from the clothes posts, the fence, the barn, or the woodpile. There never was a more tireless, spirited, brilliant singer. From the intensity of his feelings, he sometimes droops that expressive little tail of his, which is usually so erect and saucy.

Year after year wrens return to the same nesting places: a box set up against the house, a crevice in the barn, a niche under the eves; but once home, always home to them. The nest is kept scrupulously clean; the house-cleaning, like the house-building and renovating, being accompanied by the cheeriest of songs, that makes the bird fairly tremble with its intensity. But however angelic the voice of the house wren, its temper can put to flight even the English sparrow. Nevertheless, it is a safe precaution in making wren houses to cut the entrance hole no larger than the ring that is drawn with a pencil around a silver quarter of a dollar – a hole too small for sparrows but just right for wrens. They really prefer boxes to the holes in stumps and trees they used to occupy before there were any white people on this continent. But the little mites have been known to build in tin cans, coat pockets, old shoes, mittens, hats, glass jars, and even inside a human skull that a medical student hung out in the sun to bleach!

The male begins to carry twigs into the house before he finds a mate. The day little Jenny Wren appears on the scene, how he does sing! Dashing off for more twigs, but stopping to sing to her every other minute, he helps furnish the cottage quickly, but of course, he overdoes it – he carries in more twigs and hay and feathers than the little house can hold, then pulls half of them out again. Jenny gathers, too, for she is a bustling housewife and arranges matters with neatness and despatch to suit herself. Neither vermin nor dirt will she tolerate within her well-kept home. Everything she does pleases her ardent little lover. He applauds her with song; he flies about her with a nervous desire to protect; he seems beside himself with happiness. Let anyone pass too near his best beloved, and he begins to chatter excitedly: chit-chit-chit-chit as much as to say “Oh, do go away, go quickly! Can’t you see how nervous and fidgety you make me?”

If you fancy that Jenny Wren, who is patiently sitting on the little pinkish chocolate-spotted eggs in the centre of her feathery bed is a demure and angelic creature, you have never seen her attack the sparrow, nearly twice her size, that dares put his impudent head inside her door. Oh, how she flies at him! How she chatters and scolds! What a plucky little shrew she is, after all! Her piercing, chattering, scolding notes are fairly hissed into his ears until he is thankful enough to escape with his life.

What rent do the wrens pay for the little houses you put up for them? No man is clever enough to estimate the vast numbers of insects on your place that they destroy. They eat nothing else, which is the chief reason why they are so lively and excitable. Unable to soar after flying insects because of their short, round wings, they keep, as a rule, rather close to the ground which their finely-barred feathers so closely match. Whether hunting for grubs in the wood-pile, scrambling over the brush heap after spiders, searching among the trees to provide a dinner for their large families, or creeping, like little feathered mice, in queer nooks and crannies among the outbuildings on the farm, they are always busy in your interest which is also theirs. It certainly pays, in every sense, to encourage wrens."