Birdhouses

Four years ago we bought a professional sawmill out of frustration of what we would get per pine tree if we sold it to a company making pallets. Let me tell you a bit about this first. We wanted to cut quite some pine trees and replace them for other tree species to create more biodiversity. We followed the procedures and contacted the forestry who marked around 30 trees which we were allowed to cut. Then I went to this pallet company between Selva and Inca and a few days later the boss came here and inspected the trees. He was interested. But when I asked him what the value of these trees would be for us he was not really eager to give an answer. Instead he said that I did not have to worry about anything, his company would do everything including getting rid of all the branches and I should realize that this wood is very low quality wood. I repeated my question and pointed at a straight pine tree with a diameter at the trunk of around 40 cm. He looked at it and said that I would get about 12 euro for it. Twelve euro !!!! I now understood why he and his partner both drove Mercedes 500 SEC cars - one of the most expensive Mercedes cars on the market. I did not sell the trees to him, but what should I do with it? I could make firewood from it, but would this be the best I could do with it?

Sawmill
I bought a new sawmill instead, a professional one, a WoodMizer, a well known brand. Last year we have processed around 15 trees and sawed it into planks and posts of various sizes. It's amazing to see how much wood you get from just 1 tree. And the wood that you cannot use as construction wood is being used as firewood - like the thicker branches; the smaller branches are being chipped for mulch. So we are using the whole tree on our own estate.

Bird houses
With some of the first planks you saw on the mill we had doubt whether to turn it into firewood or not. The idea to make birdhouses of it came up and so finally I found the time to work on this. Sofar this week I have made 3: one for the little owl (Dutch 'steenuil' , one for the kestrel (Dutch 'torenvalk') and one for the cave pigeon (Dutch 'holenduif'). There are more to come, but right now it's horrible wet and cold weather and I need to do it outside the workshop as I don't want to get too much sawdust inside.

Glazing rubber for roofing...
The roof of the birdhouse for the cave pigeon has been treated with glazing rubber compound which you normally use for gluing windows in cars. This was purely by coincidence though. Ondrej - a Czech guy of 32 who is helping us here for a few months and specialized as car and engine mechanic (super guy, fixes everything !!) - was redoing the front window of the Hitachi excavator as it had not been done properly by the former owner using silicone instead of proper rubber. We still had an old syringe which we had already opened in the past. We thought it would have been hard by now, but when I cut it in half with a grinder it proved to be still kind of liquid. Unfortunately I could not use it in a syringe anymore, so I was about to throw it away when the idea came up to use it as a protective layer on the wooden roof of the birdhouse as it would be water repelling.

Stone marten
Lovely animals, very cute, but they love break tubes in vehicles (the rubber of these tubes is said to contain fish oil which attracts the marten) and they robbing nests of birds either for the eggs or the young birds, they are not really picky. To prevent the marten to rob the nest of the little own we have created a kind of hall behind the opening hole with a second hole not in line with the first hole, so the marten can not get into the actual nest (see also photo of the layout of the birdhouse).

Nesting platform for the red kite (Spanish 'milano real' , Dutch 'rode wouw').
Ondrej practices rock climbing and I have asked him if he would be willing to climb in one of the highest pine trees here and create some sort of nesting platform for the most beautiful bird on the island: the red kite. We see this bird every day , sometimes just a few meters above us. It's a magnificent bird, beautiful colors, forked tail and also immensely large in size (span width of about 160 cm). If a red kite will appreciate our foundation for the nest and use it we will install a webcam in the tree and share it publicly with the world.