Karen Wils photo A birdhouse awaits a tenant.

ESCANABA — Welcome home, feathered friends.

The house is swept clean and freshly painted. An enticing meal of thistle and sunflower seeds awaits your arrival. Yoopers are anticipating guests.

Birdhouses of many sizes and styles are hanging from tree limbs, fence posts and rafters ready to welcome back the hundreds of migrating birds to Upper Michigan.

Everything from simple wooden platforms for robins and phoebes to build their nests on to elaborate hand crafted mansions for birds to live in are now set in place for the chickadees and the blue birds to take up residence in.

I remember my dad building birdhouses in his workshop in the basement. He used scraps of wood from other projects to make the small, A-framed houses. Then he let us kids paint them. I think a blue house and a green house hung in tree limbs near camp for many years.

I don’t recall too many birds nesting in them, but we had a fun project and a sense of accomplishment.

In later years, I remember reading about birdhouses and how they have to be just the right size, with the right sized opening, and hung at the right height to attract each different species of wild bird. Some birds like to fly straight into the birdhouse door. Other birds like to have a perch mounted beneath the birdhouse door.

We made more sophisticated houses. We had wood duck houses and got mergansers instead.

We put up houses for wrens and got a family of chickadees. But it did not matter, it was fun just to be a part of mother nature’s game.

Modern birdhouse designs have become a real work of art. I have seen talented woodworkers make birdhouses to be miniatures of the family’s home, or made to look like log cabins, hotels or churches. My uncle Joe, years ago, made birdhouses shaped like acorns.

There is a long list of the varieties of birdhouses — purple martin houses, Amish birdhouses, bird condos, blue bird manors, and beachside bird cottages, to name a few.

It is interesting to note that not all species of birds look for a house to nest in. It is only the cavity nesters that try to get inside of something to lay their eggs. Old, mature trees with some center rot make perfect homes for cavity nesters. Manmade bird houses were designed to make it easy for birds to nest if enough trees weren’t available.

Some birds are ground nesters like the killdeer and the sandpiper. Watch out for their speckled eggs right beneath your feet.

Some birds like the blue jays and cardinal weave a nest on tree branches.

By the middle of May, all of our feathered friends are busy nesting, laying eggs or raising their broods.

So, don’t raise the rent on your birdhouse, tree limbs, or shorelines, it’s time for the new families to move in.

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Karen (Rose) Wils is a lifelong north Escanaba resident. Her folksy columns appear weekly in Lifestyles.