My first clue to her claim on the shack was the sudden appearance of a carefully structured and tightly packed cluster of leaves above the door lintel. It happened after a period of wet weather, and I thought perhaps the leaves had been dislodged by the rain, as my shack is a friend to the elements, and likes to welcome them in. I knocked the leaf structure down, and noticed that there was a quantity of moss in the centre. My immediate though was, 'oh no a mouse nest', and I was careful to clear the whole lot out. I am a little bit squeamish about baby mice.
The next day when I opened the shack door, I noticed a tell tale sign of leaves on the mat. I looked up, and sure enough there was the pile of leaves back again. I immediately responded with my broom. This went on for a few weeks. The strange thing was, it didn't look like a nest - there was no entry or exit hole, and there were no signs of life from within it. Some scratch markings appeared on the lintel, and a white deposit that looked more from a bird than a mouse. Or perhaps a bat. Nothing makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck than a bat.
Then one day I opened the door and there she was on my table. She quickly flew past me and sat on the fence for quite a while twittering at me in a way that sounded very much like scolding. So that changed things. I was concerned that if the wren was trying to build a nest, she would desert it when the young were born because of the disturbance I would create on a daily basis.
I put a bird box up on the shack, and tried to encourage her in by putting some of her leaves in it, and draping the moss on the perch. I even staple gunned some roofing felt over what I thought was the access hole. The next day the leaves were back in their usual place, and I worked out that she was probably coming in through a tailor made little doorway at the bottom of the shack door, just below the fairies' door knocker.
At that point I accepted the inevitable, and decided to live alongside her in a companionable sort of way. The leaves never did turn into a nest, and I wondered if she was suffering from ocd, or was mentally challenged in some other way. Some trauma at birth when she was prematurely evicted from her nest, or perhaps she was a lone bird who had the nesting urge, but hadn't been able to find a mate, so the nesting blueprint in her mind wasn't fully formed.
Then I discovered that is was most likely a pair, when I saw them hopping quietly about in the tree next to my shack. I wondered if there are same sex couplings in the bird world, and this was what they created as a kind of nest.
Then just recently I was lying in my hammock reading the Heap's Lush Times ( I got him a new one), and she fluttered in and perched on the hammock pole. I watched fascinated as I was able to witness her whirring, hovering, fluttering progress from hammock pole to table, then from table to lintel. Once there she proceded to eye up the pile of leaves for some time, head on one side then the other. Then she chose one leaf, picked it out of the pile, and discarded it so it landed on the floor. That explained the leaves that had been appearing there for the last few days. Then as quickly as she appeared she whirred out again.
So I don't know what's going on now. Perhaps she was alone, and now she's found someone she doesn't need an almost-nest any more. Anyway, I've enjoyed our time together very much, and maybe she'll come back next year and make a proper nest with her man in the bird box.
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