The big excitement in our yard is that a pair of house wrens has set up house in our bluebird nest box. Vic and I got the nest box from Friends of Shipley Nature Center last year, but I put it up too late in the season to attract any bluebirds. A male bluebird examined it several times over the summer, but no female joined him.
I was hoping that the male bluebird would come back this spring and find a mate. Sorry, bluebird, the house wrens beat you to the box. Or did they?
House wren males are known to build dummy nests, sometimes several of them. Our nest box now holds a loose arrangement of twigs that pretty much fills the box. I peeked in the box at night, and there doesn't seem to be any fine material that would line a functioning nest. So I'm not sure that what we have really qualifies as a true nest. It may simply be a dummy nest.