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The kids used to make the holes for the house wren house one inch in diameter. That was from the instruction books. Those books are outdated now, and the kids are old. Now all the newer instruction books advise the hole for a house wren home to be one-and-one-eighth inch. For the downy woodpecker the holes are to be one-and-one-quarter inch.
The old birdhouse books always began with the wren house, with a base, two sides, gabled back and front and peaked roof – seven small boards in all – and the hole as mentioned with a dowel perch under it.
But human knowledge of the natural world progresses, even while the wren house seemingly does not. Now we are advised against the installation of perches; perches used more by predators than by the house wren – who, it is now said, does not need a perch. The house wren hole has been expanded in diameter. A hinge on the bottom or side or top is now mandatory, since the importance for birdhouses of annual cleaning has become known. Drainage holes in the base are always advised. Ventilation holes under the eaves are always advised.
One kid in the neighborhood inherited a different project. He came home one early spring afternoon and his great-grandfather’s Lincoln was in the street and his great-grandfather was in the garage, standing over a collection of wooden forms in different shapes, and dowels and spikes.
The project – his great-grandfather’s project for the kid – was to assemble and paint and then sell lawn and garden windvanes in the shape of flying ducks. There was the sturdy one-anda half-inch pine fuselage in the shape of a flying duck’s body in profile (this particular kid thought it resembled the shape more of a fish duck – a merganser); then a dowel acting as an axle goes through the body from one side to the other; then wings of two-prop propellers are affixed on a spindle at the ends of the dowels. Set it atop a 4-foot steel rod, stick it in the lawn or landscaping or garden, and in the wind on a summer day the blades spin, the vane pivots and the neat little duck swings in the breeze.
His great-grandfather was a great capitalist and entrepreneur.
The added value came from the kid’s ability to paint duck caricatures on the windvanes. He was a student of North American ducks – their coloration and identification, their geographical range, their nesting habits, their diet. Only the first of which mattered to this little basement (in the early spring) or garage (in the summer) project. Because he was one of those artistic kids. The kid in the family or neighborhood or class or school who could draw or color (as we called it) and paint, who had this interest, and a talent for it, and the patience.
He collected paint from the basement and garage – and this is when the kid began using Rust-Oleum for wood, and for any other colors and brushes the kid needed he gave a shopping list to his great-grandfather.
I can’t remember how much the kid sold the duck windvanes for. Was it five dollars or twenty-five dollars each? It was somebody else’s value-judgment in those days. If it was up to him – he who was no entrepreneur or capitalist – the value would be zero, because it was, he that profited from just seeing – in his mother’s and father’s backyard and his neighbors’ and his grandparents’ – the wooden canvas-back spinning white and red and black in the sun, its gray nose to the wind.
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