OK children, let’s start our activity; you adults at home can follow along or join in. You will find in front of you some small branches and twigs, a few leaves, dried grasses, a pile of moss and lichen and plant down, some strands of spider web silk, strips of bark, a bunch of twine and bits of yarn, a snakeskin, tufts of fur, a ball of monofilament fishing line, and a dollop of mud.
Now: take these materials and build a nest.
Oh, one more thing: no hands! You can use only your mouth and perhaps an occasional foot.
Impossible? Well, that is what many of our small feathered brethren do every season, some more than once a season. I am not talking about least terns and piping plovers, that make a bare scrape in the sand, sometimes decorated with shells and pebbles; and I am not talking about bald eagles and ospreys that add to their enormous nests every year, but all the small songbirds that are our backyard neighbors- the robins, cardinals and catbirds, the sparrows and vireos and others. These birds accomplish amazing feats of nest-building that defy the elements. Perhaps the peak of these architects are the orioles, deftly weaving their baskets of materials-flimsy but incredibly strong- that hang and sway with their precious cargo from the tips of branches way up high.
This is the time of year to appreciate nests, when the trees and shrubs are stripped of their leaves. It just may be one of the few redeeming features of winter. Now you will see these beautiful constructions that existed right under your nose all season long, their creators silently sitting on their precious eggs or hatchlings as you walk by. I am looking at two such nests on my lane that definitely evaded my notice altogether. I can reach out and touch these empty cradles now, but had no idea that they were there while they were being used. Birds instinctively seek concealment and camouflage, and then stealthily leave and re-enter their nests without attracting any attention. It is not only the building of the nests, done so secretively, but the instinctive placement of them that is so amazing. Lodged securely in the fork of four branchlets of a hydrangea: of course that was the right place for a nest! And when there were leaves, impossible to detect! You can almost see the mind of the bird operating.
Now we can appreciate birds’ nests: their perfect or imperfect symmetry, their strength and endurance, their understated elegance, their natural beauty. And appreciate, too, the creatures that built them. Some will say that all this is the result of instinct, as if that in itself were not noteworthy. But it is a fact that there is a great deal of individual variation in nest building, and birds do make use of novel materials as they appear; it has been documented that some birds are using cellophane in place of snakeskins: sadly it is more abundant.
Nests of course vary according to species, and there are those who can differentiate them; I have four field guides devoted to birds’ nests, one published in 1902. In the 19th and early 20th centuries people used to collect bird nests- even with their clutches of eggs- but most people today just appreciate them where they are. A nest sitting on a shelf is a pale shadow to the one in a bush withstanding these harsh winter winds.
Bird nests, like so much of nature, remind us that the other-than-human world has virtues that rival anything we have come up with. We should be humble in that knowledge.
