Bird of the Month: Northern House Wren
Northern House Wren. Photo by Jeff Bryant.
By Roger Digges, CCAS Vice-President
When Cathy and I walk along the streams at Meadowbrook Park on a warm, muggy July morning, we enjoy listening to the bubbly, staccato, and very loud (for its size) song of the Northern House Wren. Like most birds, wrens prefer to be invisible as far as non-wrens are concerned. But the free Merlin app (https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/) seems to be very good at identifying house wren vocalizations. So you can use it to help you learn this small bird’s song and, very possibly, find it moving about in dense tangles hunting for insects to eat.
You will know that the bird you see is a wren when you see it cocking its barred tail at an angle. While five wrens regularly appear in Champaign County, only two wrens are present in July, the small Northern House Wren, which is a muted brown and gray and about the size of a chickadee, and the Carolina Wren, which is a rich, warm brown with a long, bright, white eyestripe, and is a bit larger than a House Sparrow. Both are quite common, but their songs and appearances are very different.
Where can you find house wrens? Unlike the Carolina wren, you can’t find it at all in our area from November through April as Northern House Wrens spend their colder months where the insects are, in the southern United States. From May through October, you’re most likely to find house wrens in or near dense vegetation, singing or hunting for meals, especially in parks, forest preserves, open woods, or your own backyard, if you have one. If you’re lucky, they may even nest around your home, in tree holes or wreaths or hanging planters, even discarded old boots or cans, anything within 100 feet of thick, woody vegetation that offers protection from the weather and predators.
How can you attract house wrens? Since they’re insectivores, they won’t eat the seeds we typically offer in bird feeders. But they will eat mealworms (as will Eastern Bluebirds). You can buy feeders specially made to hold mealworms. As with any feeder, make sure it’s out of the reach of squirrels, 5 feet off the ground with a baffle attached to its pole, 7 feet away from a tree or fence, and 9 feet from any roof. Squirrels are great climbers and jumpers.
If you do have a yard, like all birds, wrens are attracted to water. We have a water feature in our yard that our local house wrens enjoy drinking from. But a bird bath, especially one with a small fountain works as well. When we prune shrubs, we try to create a brush pile in late winter, which will offer wrens shelter, protection from predators, and good hunting. So can you if you have space for it.
Male house wrens will build nests in artificial nest boxes (allaboutbirdhouses.com has instructions for building your own). As I discovered in managing a bluebird trail years ago, male house wrens build multiple nests (they loved bluebird boxes) to allow a potential mate choices. She will line the nest she chooses with grass, feathers, snakeskin, anything soft, and often spider egg sacs (spiders eat nest parasites). Female wrens do the job of incubating eggs, but both will feed the hatchlings until they fledge. In a good year, Northern House Wrens may raise two broods of 3 to 10 youngsters. Once the cool winds of autumn begin to blow, Northern House Wrens will migrate to warmer climes and, hopefully, many will find their way back to us in May.
How are Northern House Wrens doing? Unlike most songbirds, their population has been stable over the past half century, still numbering in the tens of millions. Even so, let’s do what we can to keep it that way.
