Bird’s Nests
I’ve been trimming back an overgrown laurel hedge in my back yard.
In the process I found two bird’s nests. Neither of them had any birds or eggs in them. I was amazed at what amazing structures they are.
The first nest was down close to the ground, no more than a couple of feet above the soil in the lowest level crotch of the bush.
It was basically mud clumped together and reinforced with twigs and grass. Birds have known how to reinforce the mud in their nests long before humans invented reinforced concrete. It’s the same principle.
Then I was trimming some really tall laurel that had never been topped. Most people around here trim the laurel into high hedges. But this particular section was only trimmed up to about eight feet and the rest just grew wild. Laurel has wonderful white flowers on it when it isn’t trimmed. The top, untrimmed portion of this hedge was full, covered in flowers, and much wider than the trimmed portion.
I was cutting these particular branches out because they had become so large and heavy that they had sunken down into the trimmed part of the hedge. Not pretty. They also made it difficult to run the lawnmower through that part of the yard.
After I had pulled out a large branch I noticed a very large blob of mud and moss in one of the crotch areas where a larger trunk branched in several directions. It would have been about twelve feet above the ground before I took it down. Nestled tightly and securely into the clump of mud and moss was another nest, even bigger and more elaborate than the other one.
Isn’t that amazing?!
The picture really doesn’t capture the intricacy of the structure and how the inside of the nest is all lined with threads of grass that look like they were all intentionally put in place. With its attention to detail this nest looked like it belonged to a Martha Stewart breed of bird.
This has inspired me to do some more exploring on my property. If birds built these nests so close to the house, I wonder what they’ve built on more remote portions of my land. It would be so much fun to find a nest that is inhabited, find the eggs and watch them hatch.
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April 16th, 2004 at 11:51 am
Nature is endlessly fascinating and endlessly intertwined. It’s a shame that those who respect nature have been pigeon-holed into the derogative “tree huggers” and the like. It is not man v nature, it’s man as part of nature, and we rise or fall together.