Mocking birds, friend or foe?

[Joez]

We have a Mocking bird nest somewhere around my house....It uses the martin house as a post... There "was" is a martin pair flying around sometimes and was wondering if the mocking bird is deterring them to land?

[AidanRois]

Dunno about others, but my mockers don't bother my martins at all. Oddly enough, they've even worked together to run off starlings, sparrows, hawks. They all tend to keep to themselves here. The mockers even went to the opposite side of the house to nest.

[chickadee]

friend. mine has never bothered my martins. not a cavity nester carries no threat to your martins. wont stop them from nesting.

[DottieL]

But the mocking birds can sound sooo much like martins. I played Dawnsong for days and days. Now my mbird is quite the mimic. He continues to fool me....I keep looking when the mbird calls thinking maybe, just maybe, it might be the real thing.

I have seen martins and had visitors but no takers. I woukd consider myself to be a new site because I lost my colony a few years back. So I had my husband begrudgingly cut down a tree. He told me if no martins the following year, he was saving the pieces and I would have to glue the tree together again. Lol....

Well, two more years and still no martins, so he moved my house to the front yard early this spring. My DH then converted the 12apt Trio to roomier 6apts and installed SREH. I am very insecure about using the SREH.

The first group of flybys landed on the house and started pecking at the green round hole plugs that were left after the conversion and completely ignored the open SREH. So I covered the round hole plugs with several layers of white contact paper. If the paper doesn't hold up, I will order blanks for next year. I might have had birds if they had not been fooled by the round hole plugs.