Spring Nest Box Inside a Shell of Bark Slabs, Kept Cool and Drained (Reiber, 1916)

"The invention really consists of a weatherproof box for the nest arranged within a relatively large shell far from weatherproof."

Cut and nail a box of red cedar board (his claim 3), sized from the notebook, his box 5. Leave the floor as slats with small gaps (his slats 12). Bore the entrance 8 near the top of the front, cut a few narrow ventilating slots 10 high in the sides, and drill drainage holes 11 low down.

Make a larger box and gabled roof of bark-covered slabs, bark outward, nailed to a cedar frame and spaced a little apart so air passes through, his shell 6 and slabs 7. Drill drainage openings 14 in its base.

Fix the nesting box inside the shell on cedar blocks so it stands clear of the shell all round. Bore the shell's entrance 9 in line with the box's entrance, and fit a short dowel perch 13 just below it.

Set the house on a small platform on a post with diagonal braces, as his Fig. 1 (ours: sizes), in a shady spot before the birds return in spring.

**Edwin H. Reiber** of West Webster, New York, US 1,185,345, dated 30 May 1916, filed 13 January 1916. He claimed "a bird house, comprising a shell formed of spaced slabs and provided with an aperture in the side thereof for the passage of a bird, and a box for a nest within said shell and spaced therefrom", and in claim 3 "slabs of sassafras" and a box "of red cedar". Not built: his woodpecker house (Fig. 4) and the suet-filled pine cone feeder. He gives no sizes: all sizes, the entrance size, nails and the post are ours.