Can well placed bird houses on a farm help to control flies (1 Viewer)

Greetings all,

My first post here; quite a nice site you have

I have a small farm in upstate NY where we produce 100% natural, organic, no grain, no chemical beef/goat. One difficulty with using no chemicals is that flies can be pretty bad during the summer. There are clever ways that some people have come up with for reducing flies like rotating chickens in paddocks where the cows were 3 or 4 days before; I started doing this but it takes time and then you have dozens of eggs a day to sell (hard to do up here - EVERYONE sells eggs).

Since I really enjoy wild birds, I've been thinking about building some birdhouses to encourage the kind of birds which would impact the cattle fly populations (there are several types - face, black, etc...). Of course, long term I'm working on planting trees and leaving strips of vegetation to encourage birds to stay. However, it might be faster to put up 10-20 (more?) bird houses.

Does anyone have any information about how do this? What kind of birds would I want to encourage? How long does it take for them to take up residency? ;-)

Thanks much for any info,
JR


Oh, by the way, I've also been trying to learn about building bat houses.

amazing nygrass ! - Definitely , set up nest boxes that favor tree swallows and you can do a back to back on them with a blue bird box - Not sure if you have purple martins - but a condo for them might be magic . Another thing to consider are bat boxes to take care of the night shift. Can I buy produce from your harvest? We are down state though..

danehower said:

amazing nygrass ! - Definitely , set up nest boxes that favor tree swallows and you can do a back to back on them with a blue bird box - Not sure if you have purple martins - but a condo for them might be magic . Another thing to consider are bat boxes to take care of the night shift. Can I buy produce from your harvest? We are down state though..

Click to expand...

Heh Danehower! My barn is quite old and pretty "holy" so I have TONS of barn swallows. They are very active outside first thing in the morning. I assume they are feeding (chaotic flight patterns seem to suggest they are scooping up insects). We have robins, lots of american goldfinches, morning doves (says my wife), warblers (says a friend of mine), crows, chickadees, hawks, red winged blackbirds, sometimes cardinals. There are large flocks of birds that hang out near the cows; I think they do "good work" (they ravage the manure piles looking for grubs); not sure sure what they are. Not sure about purple martins either (I have lots to learn).

I don't think we have bats. Kind of surprising. Everywhere I've lived I've seen bats; you'd think they'd be here; perhaps too cold? (Also there's that "white nose" thing that's killing them.)

Seems we have more birds this year too than the last couple (we've only been up here 3 years). It's a riot of sound whenever I'm in the pastures.

I see lots of people talking about blue birds? What makes them so nice?

A back to back, huh? I'll have to look that up.

JR

Nygrass,

Welcome, good to see you on here.

As a boy I grew up on a farm in Central Vermont and its my opinion the Barn Swallow is your best bird friend. Actually its a little more than just an opinion, I've done a bit of studying on the subject.

Second to the Barn Swallow, I agree the Purple Martin is another good bird for fly control. Both species are known to eat the larva and flies of the housefly Musca domestica and stable fly Stomoxy calcitrans as well as other fly of the family Muscidae commonly found in barns and around cattle. However a key difference between the Purple Martin(our largest Swallow), and the barn Swallow is that the Purple Martin is primarily a high flying aerial eater of insects, 10 mtr to 150 mtrs altitude if my memory is correct, and the Barn Swallow is a low flying aerial eater of insects, as low as 1 meter or less. You can learn a lot about these two species by going to bna.bird.cornell.edu/bna, however you will have to pay $5 for 30 days access to their extensive database and will read many pages of data...

I also believe that Barn Swallows will make use of Purple Martin houses for nesting quarters. So the idea of building several Purple Martin houses is well worth considering.

There is a Purple Martin Society organization you can contact for information about Purple Martins and bird houses for them:
http://www.purplemartins.com/

In the meanwhile, here is a much more complete look at the subject of barn and livestock fly control for the natural (organic?) farmer:

http://attra.ncat.org/calendar/question.php/2009/04/06/what_information_can_you_give_me_on_fly

And for Bat houses:
http://www.batconservation.org/content/Bathouseimportance.html

You can also attract several species of flycatchers with nest boxes