I always look forward to tax day. Yes, I realize that sounds crazy (and I also know I’m a month behind the times with this post). It’s just that I associate that day with the return of the house wrens. For the past eight summers we’ve always had a pair nesting somewhere around our garden, and the birds return every spring within a day or two of April 15th, regular as clockwork.
If you haven’t been observant enough to notice house wrens in the past, you can certainly be excused. Physically they are tiny, even a little bit smaller than a chickadee. Their feathers are a drab dusty brown with no distinguishing marks or features. Males and females look exactly the same, just little brown birds. What makes them special is their song. Male wrens are very territorial and they mark their spaces with peals of a musical, cascading song that they repeat over and over through the day. It’s unbelievable the lung power these little guys have. It still amazes me when I hear the loud unmistakable sound of a male wren and trace its source to a teeny little bird with a stubby tail cocked over his back.
In addition to the song, my husband and I enjoy the soap opera lives of the wrens in our garden. We have a wren house that we are careful to hang in a prominent spot in early April, so we’ll be ready when the migrants come back to the area. As soon as we hear the male birds singing in the neighborhood, we start keeping a close eye on the house in hopes that one will find it and deem it suitable. This year we snagged a wren on the first day of the season (April 14th this year, a day earlier than usual). He immediately set up camp in our garden, singing at the top of his voice to warn away any encroachers. Every moment he wasn’t singing he was gathering tiny twigs and carrying them into the birdhouse. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a four-inch bird struggling to maneuver a six-inch twig into a one-inch hole in a birdhouse.
The next week or two is the most suspenseful stage of the wren soap opera. Will the male wren be able to entice a female into his house? Some years we’ve watched as poor Mr. Wren works to entice one potential mate after another into examining the nest within the little birdhouse, to no avail. As the female hops in and around the birdhouse, he keeps up a continual peal of ingratiating song. “Don’t you love it? I did it all for you, sweetheart!” All I can assume is that female wrens are extremely picky, because more often than not they’ll check it out thoroughly only to reject him and his house and disappear in search of something better. I get quite indignant sometimes, wondering what’s wrong with that very fine birdhouse in this very fine yard. I can only imagine how Mr. Wren feels about it.
This year he got lucky, though. Three days after he had arrived at the house, a female showed up and seemed to think it was acceptable. Still, Mr. Wren’s troubles were hardly over. She proceeded to make him remove each and every stick of the nest he’d spent days slaving over, and the two started over completely from scratch. Apparently as with many newlyweds, his decorating style wasn’t to her taste. Can’t you just hear her? “That naugahyde lazy boy chair just has to go!”
So now we wait in hopes that soon we’ll hear the peeps of baby wrens. Judging by the constant coming and going we see from the nest, there must be babies in there. Mr. Wren sings now in snatches, between trips to and from the little green house. If all goes well, the babies should fledge soon, and then he and the missus can start over with another brood. A house wren’s work is never done!
