Or he may sneak out to woo the female on a neighboring male's territory-perhaps destroying her eggs or young afterwards so that she must lay new eggs ( his eggs) in their place.
In many cases, a male House Wren may lure a second mate to move in to a nest site on his territory while his primary mate is still incubating their clutch. Indeed, House Wrens are fiercely impatient across the board. We’d prefer that the bird patiently and politely wait its turn, perhaps. It must discover an existing hole to nest within-and if there isn’t a vacant spot available, it does what it must to survive and reproduce. Competition is fierce among cavity-nesting birds, especially for those like the House Wren that can’t carve out a home for itself. And in the human world, as in the world of the Greek gods, infanticide is generally frowned upon.īut the wrens don’t kill for vengeance they do it for survival. In a strange twist of etymological fate, Troglodytes aedon, which translates roughly as “crevice-dwelling nightingale,” was named after a child-killer-Aëdon, the Queen of Thebes, who in Greek mythology accidentally killed her own child while aiming for the son of a rival, and was then transformed by Zeus into a nightingale.
#WREN BIRDS CODE#
You could say the House Wren was doomed to get caught up in the sticky code of human morality from the start. It would seem that the House Wren is, as Sherman put it, a “felon, criminal, demon, and devil.” "They act precisely like the parents of vicious children, refusing to believe the evil things their darlings do."Īnd indeed, over the last century, several studies have confirmed Sherman’s observations: Wrens will puncture the eggs of bluebirds, woodpeckers, nuthatches, sparrows, chickadees, swallows, Bobolinks, and warblers, and occasionally take over their nests. "They are fond of their bird and are angry when the truth is spoken about it," Sherman wrote in The Wilson Bulletin in 1925. Then, when two wren-beak-sized holes appeared in the shell of a Black-billed Cuckoo egg, she described the bird as a “frightful devil that thrust its sharp bayonet into the egg.” In time she came to launch a full-fledged crusade against the House Wren, publishing her observations-and condemnations-of the bird in scientific journals, and demanding that ornithologists and bird-lovers face the facts, denounce House Wren boxes, and end their fawning over these “criminal” birds.Īt the time, some ornithologists wrote Sherman off as overly emotional-to which she countered that they were the emotional ones, too attached to their little brown birds to see them for the monsters they really are.
First she saw one invade a Phoebe nest and toss out two eggs-an “evil deed,” she wrote in her journal. All the while, Sherman, an artist and budding ornithologist, meticulously recorded the birds' rendezvous, their squabbles, their romances, and their parenting trials.īut before long, Sherman’s admiration for the wrens began to sour. At one point, there were 10 pairs nesting on the property, each raising at least five chicks a season. Opportunistic nesters, House Wrens will set up shop in pretty much any empty crevice they can find-John James Audubon’s illustration of a House Wren family depicts them nesting in an old hat-and over the next several years, as Sherman hung birdhouses in her yard, more wren tenants eagerly filled the vacancies. In the early 1900s, when Althea Sherman began noticing House Wrens nesting in her backyard in Iowa, she was delighted.
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