Picking the Right Birdhouse for your Birdwatching

Bird watching is a favorite pastime of many. Learning to do it well requires quite a bit of time investment, however, and the right sort of equipment. While there’s not much one can do to accelerate the learning process and quickly acquire the different defining characteristics of different bird species, learning about equipment can be a lot easier than one might expect. There’s quite a bit out there, but it’s fairly easy to navigate, so long as you know the basic principles of birdhouse creation. Here, we’ll go over some of the most common kinds of birdhouses so you can make an informed choice when you decide to buy one.

Plastic Birdhouses

Many people’s first birdhouse is a plastic one. Plastic birdhouses often come with attached gravity bird feeders, allowing them to be easily refilled and quickly deployed. The nice thing about plastic birdhouses is that they’re highly durable and take well to virtually any kind of weather, rain or shine. The attached vertical feeder common to most plastic birdhouses makes for easy loading and reloading, and attracts quite a number of common bird species. Cardinals and Blue Jays make for particularly common and easily attracted species. This makes plastic birdhouses an easy first investment for new birdwatchers.

Wooden Birdhouses

Wooden birdhouses are a common and traditional next step for amateur birdwatchers to take. One of the main attractions to wooden birdhouses is the fact that they are highly customizable. They can often be purchased unassembled, allowing them to be built to the standards of the instruction or customized on the fly. Wooden birdhouses often have more complicated feeding mechanisms, like dish feeders attached to the bottoms or built into the bottom. Wooden birdhouses are an easy step up for birdwatchers with some experience observing common species, as they attract all the common bird types and some of the more uncommon ones.

Mountable vs Unmountable Birdhouses

Most birdhouses come in either mountable or unmountable varieties. The mountable kinds of birdhouses are those that can be attached to a post, tree, or wall with a mounting hook. Unmountable birdhouses are better for suspension from a patio or tree branch, and allow for somewhat more convenient viewing of all the kinds of species they attract. The choice between mountable and unmountable is largely one of convenience – if it’s easier to set up a mountable birdhouse, that’s the way amateur birdwatchers should go. If there’s no trouble setting up an unmountable one, however, it offers definite benefits that any birdwatcher will enjoy.

There are many other kinds of birdhouses on the market, but plastic and wooden ones are the most common, and mountable/unmountable the most common distinction. This should be enough to give most would-be amateur birdwatchers a good jump start on observation, and as they gain more experience, the additional types of birdhouses will be much easier to understand and navigate.