Whether you're playing a regular account or an Ironman account, here's what you need to know about birdhouse runs in Old School RuneScape.

Birdhouse runs are a great way to train your hunter skill and earn some, or OSRS GP get bird nests, fruit tree seeds, and spirit seeds for your Ironman account or OSRS accounts for sale. The XP and OSRS gold come effortlessly since birdhouse runs only take a minute, and you can do them every 50 minutes.

How It Works

For each birdhouse run, you will use four birdhouses and ten seeds and get empty bird nests, bird nests that contain jewelry, bird nests that contain seeds, or very rare bird nests that contain eggs. You can sell the bird nests on the GE for many OSRS GP. On top of this, you will also receive feathers which for a regular account might be low value, but for an ironman account, they will be handy as well, as you won't have to spend your OSRS gold and time buying feathers when you want to go fishing.

Requirements

To be able to start doing birdhouse runs, you will need a member's account since the hunter skill is a member's only skill, birdhouses and seeds, a teleport means, and access to the Fossil Island.

How to Unlock Fossil Island

To unlock Fossil Island, you must complete the Bone Voyage quest. You can start this intermediate-level quest by speaking to Curator Haig inside Varrock's Museum. To start the quest, you will need 100 kudos. You can obtain kudos by completing the Natural History Quiz inside the museum, cleaning finds, and speaking to Historian Minas about certain quests that you've done, such as Demon Slayer, Rune Mystery, Shield of Arrav, The Grand Tree, Hazeelcult, or Priest in Peril.

There are some more quests you can talk about to obtain kudos, but the list is limited, and not all of the quests you completed will be interesting for the historian, so he will only give you points for the ones that interest him. The quest has no skill requirements, as obtaining the kudos is challenging enough.

Mushroom Transportation System

After you complete the quest and gain access to Fossil Island, make sure to find the House on the Hill, the Mushroom Meadow Mycelium transportation system, and the Verdant Valley one. Like this, you will have a quick way to travel to set and dismantle your birdhouse traps.

Buying Birdhouse Traps

You can buy birdhouse traps at the Grand Exchange. However, if you're an ironman or decide to make them yourself to save some coins, you will need a set of logs and a clockwork with a chisel and a hammer in your inventory. The log type will decide what type of birdhouse you will get; the higher the log, the higher the crafting level you'll need. You can buy clockwork, but as an ironman, you must make them from steel bars. To do this, you will need level 8 crafting and level 25 Construction to build the Crafting Table 2 in your workshop in your player-owned house. Unless you obtain your steel bars as drops from monsters, you will also need level 3 Smithing to make the steel bars.

Bird Nests

Since most of your income from birdhouse runs comes from the bird nests, you should know a few things about them. Before selling the bird nests, you will need to empty them, and you can even use a pestle and mortar to crush them for even more profits. This is because the crushed bird nests are a key ingredient in one of the most used pots in OSRS, the Saradomin Brew, which you can start making at 81 Herblore and which will be extremely useful for many boss fights and activities later on.

Nests That Contain Rings

The jewelry pieces you can find in them are primarily low value but still really useful, especially for Ironman players. As an ironman, it might be an excellent way to stock up on sapphire rings which you can then enchant into rings of recoil, and emerald rings, which you can then enchant into rings of dueling by using different levels of the enchant spell in your standard spellbook and training your magic skill as well. Other pieces of jewelry you could find inside such nests are diamond, ruby, and cheap OSRS gold rings. When you get a nest, there are 32 chances out of 100 that it will contain a ring.

Egg Bird Nests

These are the rarest type, and you can use the eggs inside to get some Prayer XP inside the Woodcutting guild, where you'll also have a chance at getting the evil chicken outfit.

Bird Nests Containing Seeds

Some of the nests will contain seeds, and you will receive at most one seed nest per birdhouse, and therefore a maximum total of 4 during a run. This is where you will get an extra coin or the extra farming XP for your Ironman.

This is because they contain tree seeds, fruit tree seeds, hardwood tree seeds, and even spirit tree seeds. Even though many of the tree seeds you will receive sell for very little, they are still great for Ironman accounts who want to level their farming skill. However, you will sometimes receive rarer seeds that sell for more. For example, you have a 1 in20 chance for a maple seed that sells for 10k OSRS GP, 1 in 27 for a yew seed worth 37k GP, or 1 in 168 to get a Dragonfruit tree seed that sells for 150k OSRS gold on the GE, to name a few.