Expert: Julia Booth - 7/28/2008

Question
Hello,
I have house wrens that are now eating my thistle seed that I bought for my yellow finch.  I now do not have any Finch and all I have are house wrens.  How do you get rid of them.  Last year they killed a Blue bird that was beginning to make his home in a nest for Blue birds.  They have taken over all of my Blue bird boxes.  My neighbor has a large house for the large black birds, but they do not come in back yards.  This is run over with house wrens too.  Please tell me what to do as they eat all of the food for all of the birds.  I buy expensive sun flower seeds that have already been shelled to keep the ground clean.  Please tell me where to begin with getting rid of about 30 of these birds and more every day.

Look forward to hearing from you.

Dale Sharpe

Answer
Huh -usually the Wrens go for the suet. Yes, the nyjer seed is expensive and we don't want it going to waste. I only got Bewick's Wrens at my feeders, actually. But I know the House Wrens can be aggressive about food and nesting spots.

Just to be frank, it is illegal to harm the House Wrens. But there are other ways to dissuade their behavior.

I found this on another site and I'm just going to paste it:


The House Wren can be a problem for Bluebirds, as it frequently fills several desirable nesting sites with twigs, but only uses one nest. It has also been known to enter nestboxes where Bluebirds are nesting, pecking holes in the Bluebird eggs. Being a native songbird, however, it is a protected species, and its completed nest and/or eggs should never be disturbed. It is possible to discourage a House Wren from building in a specific Bluebird nestbox before the nest is complete by repeatedly emptying the box of the twigs that the House wren deposits there. But the best defense against House Wrens is to place the Bluebirds nestbox in a fairly open location, at least 100 feet from densely wooded areas, as the House Wren prefers to nest in or near wooded land.

Some success has been reported with the use of "Wren Guards" on nestboxes. See Bob Orthwein's 1996 report on Wren Guards.

Here is that link: http://audubon-omaha.org/bbbox/ban/wrengurd.htm and another one on the same subject: http://www.bestofbbml.audubon-omaha.org/wrens7.htm

For more information on House Wrens, see http://www.sialis.org/wrens.htm

If this doesn't help you, get back to me and I'll see what else I can find.

Julia