I was walking through a park today and noticed a birdhouse. I fondly remembered back to when I was a young kid: building a birdhouse out of scrap wood with my father and then watching it become inhabited by a mob of decidedly unbird-like squirrels.
It suddenly occurred to me that birds don't need a house! Where did the idea of a birdhouse come from? What need was it supposed to fill? Who popularized the activity of building and hanging birdhouses?
Making birdhouses is such a strange thing to do when you actually stop and think about it. I can't think of many other wild animals we create public housing for!
Birds build nests in the eaves of houses, which, in Europe, are often ornate and contain many nooks and crannies (something like a bird house).
Do you consider decorated drain spouts to be birdhouses? Probably not, because they have another purpose, but of course, birds nest in those too.
People who like birds noticed this at many different places around the (Old) World (I know of no traditions of birdhouse building in pre-contact New World), but certainly they appear in SE Asia, N. Asia, and Europe. Not sure about North or Sub-saharan Africa.
Certainly, there's no evidence of any "keeping of birds" or attempts to keep birds until about 3-4000BP in China. Asians don't have a tradition of making little houses specifically for birds, though, that I know of (just of building bird-friendly architecture - which, depending on your definition of "birdhouse" could count).
Europe has had bird houses since at least the 15th century, but Turkey had them earlier (attesting to possible diffusion from east to west within the area sometimes called "Europe" - there are quite a few customs that are regarded as "primarily European," like birdhouses, that originated in Turkey (or elsewhere that it's contested whether it's European.).
Here are a couple of citations re: 13th century Anatolian/Turkish dovecotes and bird houses:
Ozen, R. Bird shelters in Turkey: birdhouses and dovecotes. Journal Kafkas Üniversitesi Veteriner Fakültesi Dergisi 2012 Vol. 18 No. 6 pp. 1079-1082.
Tekin, C and C.Z. Oguz. Traces of Birdhouse Tradition in Anatolia. World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology International Journal of Civil, Architectural, Structural, Urban Science and Engineering Vol:7 No:4, 2013
Note that neither of these journals (while dealing with archaeology) is a journal in history or archaeology. I have read that Holland was the first place in Europe to have bird houses (which argues against by-the-land diffusion if true), but argues for innovations of this type entering through port towns (as usual; see Emmanuel Wallerstein's The Origin of the Modern World-System.)