Gibby, house wrens and house sparrows are entirely different species. House sparrows are a non-native bird and are considered pests by many, thus are not protected by law. House wrens are native birds and it is illegal to tamper with their nests. I do not allow house wrens to nest in my boxes, however, because as you said they are can cause harm to the eggs and hatchlings of other cavity nesters. I remove any sticks I find in my nestboxes and, fortunately, have not come upon a completed house wren nest (or else I'd have to leave it alone). Since I monitor my nestboxes twice each week during nesting season I can usually catch early nesting attempts by wrens and stop them. You can find out more about both species at this link: www.sialis.org Kathy

Do not be too quick to dismiss the lowly sparrow. I grew up on a dairy farm in N.E.Ohio and I have always had a passing interest in bird watching, however like most people I erroneously thought a sparrow is a sparrow, is a sparrow and lumped them into one of two broad categories, song sparrows and house sparrows, all of which were often considered at best a minor nuisance. Last June I officially retired and took up nature photography as a retirement hobby. Over the summer I spent most of my time hiking the woods, meadows and swampy areas, but when the summer birds migrated last fall I then set up feeders and turned my attention to the birds that i could attract. I typically set my camera on a tripod zeroed in on a feeder or a ground feeding location, then I sit motionless with a remote shutter release in my pocket and snap pictures of the birds as they come in. In the course of taking 2 or 300 pictures a day, it goes without saying that I get a lot of shots that contain sparrows as well as the more desirable birds. Later while editing the photos I began to notice that many of the sparrows had what i thought were strange or unusual markings. In early October my Mother presented me with a book called "Birds of Ohio" by McCormac & Kennedy, published by the Lone Pine Press (ISBN 13:978-1-55105-392-9)). From this book I discovered that their are over twenty different species of Sparrows common to Ohio, two of which have red heads such as you describe. I then got another book called "The Sparrows of the united States and Canada published by Princeton University Press (ISBN 13:978-0-125-9897-1) in which they list over 62 species of Sparrows native to the U.S. & Canada. In addition, i learned that the House Sparrow is not native to North America and is officially not listed as a Sparrow, but rather they are listed as "Old World Sparrows" which includes another 37 species that have been introduced to North America, primarily from Europe. From my personal experience I would challenge everyone, rather than seek ways to discourage the lowly Sparrow, take a closer look and you might be amazed at what you see, and if the Sparrows are consuming all the seed in your feeders, do as I have done, put up more feeders because all of God's creatures gotta eat. Currently I am going through 5 30lb bags of wild bird seed a month, not to mention another two bushels of corn that i put in chicken feeders out in the meadow for the wild turkeys but then when i consider how many hours I spend watching those birds, it is really rather cheap entertainment.

Couldn't do the trap because my job has me gone for long time daily but I did shoot him with the BB gun, but to my surprise the blues are roosting on the house but I guess they needed to nest quickly so I have an old dead tree in my back yard and I saw them flying around it and to my surprise there is a hole so I got my flashlight and they built a nest in it and there are 3 eggs already.....I quess they just couldn't wait. I'm hope the second time around they will use the house since the sparrow is gone. But thank you for all your advise your right only way to get rid of the house sparrow is to kill it.

Unfortunately there is no way to get rid of them except by trapping them. They have 3-4 broods a year and will take over a yard in no time. They are very aggressive and as you witnessed will destroy tree swallow eggs and even kill the adults and babies as well as bluebirds. I used to monitor my tree swallow house and not allow any house sparrows to nest in the box. I used to plug the hole until the swallows returned and then would chase away any sparrow that had thoughts of nesting in the box. Unfortunately I had to trap them as I had a small urban yard and would have 50+ sparrows in the yard, especially in the winter. When you have that many sparrows, you won't get much of anything else. Once I kept the population under control, I didn't have a problem anymore and each year my swallows were very successful. The last year in our house there, there were six babies and they all fledged successfully.