Installing BirdNet

Believe me, I’m jealous when I hear that Spring has sprung in other parts of North America. Where I am in Quebec, it’s snowing. It may be one of the last blasts, but it’s snowing nonetheless. And we still have a few snow drifts around the house that are at least up to my shoulders...

Regardless, I’ve been working hard to install a wireless bird system in my garden in advance of the season. I’ve been sowing CNAME and A records for the last few weeks in the form of bird seed deposits to see if I can’t get the BirdNet servers to pick up my custom garden domain and do a re-direct. So far so good, but they’ve been depositing a lot of small white turd authority which I’m not sure whether it will cannibalize my organic traffic or not. TBD.

But in the mornings, I’ve begun trying to get back into shape (hopefully burning off a little winter flab in the process) by spending about 90 minutes per day — when it’s not bitterly cold in my garage — to make new bird-houses out of what was once the bed that I’d made out of 2"x8"s and particle board which served us as long as you can expect an $80 home-made bed frame could (we now have “memory foam” and a fancy store-bought frame, ooh la la).

In any event, I have a bunch of extra wood from dismantling the bed, so I’ve begun a pattern of religiously making two bird houses per day in the morning. So the birds I’ve been feeding are now learning that they are welcome to stay on the season and build little nests in order to fortify my personal garden BirdGrid.

They usually look something like this, with variation:

I’ve got the pattern worked out where, once I’ve got the sheet goods cut into strips on a table saw, I can now slam together a serviceable house in under 20 minutes. It’s not a race, of course, it’s for the pleasure of it.

And for the BirdGrid:

I’ve now got about 7 of the new-style houses installed, plus some older nodes from last season scattered around.

BirdGrid is meant as a fundamental layer in the biodiversity protocol which I’m baking into my garden from jump this season. I want them to stay, hang out, predate, eat and shit out thereby dispersing seeds on the property. In short, I want to invite Nature in according to whatever forms she chooses, and make sure she has the basic resources to do the things she needs in our garden.

Honestly, I don’t really know where it’s all going, but at this point I’ve learned enough to sit back and enjoy the process.

At a certain point, I have to just accept that the gnomes, elves, goblins, fairies and all the rest “got this” and just see what happens.

What can I say, it’s worked so far!

If nothing else, it feels good to touch and cut wood again and end the morning covered in a thin film of sawdust. Worse things could happen. With any luck, they won’t!