THOMAS BOLLINGER/USFWS
In the first week of June 2018, the subject of the first installment of this column was called “Your Friendly Neighborhood Phoebe.” I lived in a different neighborhood in 2018, but part of the idea of the title was that wherever you go, there they are. This assertion held up in Wilmot. We moved here in December 2020, and when spring arrived our friendly neighborhood phoebe showed up and began to sing.
Phoebes arrive early, even for a flycatcher. Ours was flicking its tail from the lower branches of trees around our driveway in the last week of March, when there were still patches of snow everywhere. As soon as I noticed him, I went into the three-sided structure that we call a garage and knocked an old nest off a beam that crosses the space now occupied by my Honda. The previous tenants used the space only for storage and the phoebes felt comfortable flying in and out of there at will. After we began parking a car there, they nested somewhere else, but quite nearby.
The nest I knocked down and kicked under the truck that I’m trying to sell for parts was a mass the size of a softball but shaped like a squat cylinder with a depression in the top. It is the standard cartoon type of nest; it is made of woven plant fibers, mostly grasses with the softest material lining the bottom of the cup. In the case of the retired effort that I kicked under the truck, the bird had gone modern and used some sort of manufactured stuffing from a discarded pillow.
Phoebes prefer to place their nests on built structures. They often use the horizontal beams of buildings and bridges. They chose horizontal cliff ledges before the advent of built structures in eastern North America. Suitable structures preceded European settlement by centuries; many Eastern Woodland tribal cultures constructed shelters that included horizontal beams.
The study of bird nests is a subfield of its own. I was made aware of this when I encountered the Peterson Field Guide series volumes: Hal H. Harrison’s “Field Guide to Birds’ Nests”; the eastern species are covered in a book published in 1975 and the western in 1979. Harrison was a journalist with a bent for natural history, part of the large 20th century coterie of amateurs that made serious contributions to the science of bird study. He died in January 1999 at age 92. Birdwatching seems good for your health; a large number of enthusiasts seem to live into their 80s and 90s.
Reflecting advances in the field, the Peterson series released a new field guide to birds’ nests in 2021, this one by Casey McFarland and two others.
Simply paging through one of these guides reveals the enormous variety of architectural styles deployed by birds in the construction of a place to lay eggs. Some birds make hardly any effort at all. Goatsuckers push aside some pebbles on a flat surface and lay their eggs there. The alcids do much the same thing on the side of a cliff or at the end of a burrow.
Some species are flexible. Herring gulls, for example, nest on the ground if they can find an isolated island free of (most) predators. Ground nests are minimal affairs, just a depression with a few sticks dragged into a rough oval. If forced to nest in a tree, herring gulls suddenly become artisans and build a bulky platform of interwoven grass and moss.
Herons, egrets and many raptors build bulky platforms in trees, although theirs are usually made of sticks and are not woven together as tightly. A pair of ospreys in Vineyard Haven, Mass. build a nest atop the rounded dome of a wireless telephone transmission tower with a commanding view of the surrounding water. Sticks trailed down the sides of the dome, perhaps in some vain effort to stabilize the thing. One day a stiff breeze blew the whole thing off the curved surface, and they started over at a (much lower) nesting platform at a nearby athletic field.
Other species build cup-shaped nests like the phoebe’s, but place them between forked branches. Many warblers and some finches, including the American goldfinch make such a home. The goldfinch’s is described in “Birds of America” (Gilbert T. Pearson, ed.) as “a compact, artistic structure of felted plant down, mosses, grass, leaves, bark strips, usually lined with thistledown.”
The specificity of thistledown is not that unusual. Some species seem to have an almost cultural proclivity for certain materials. Discarded snake skins are routinely incorporated into the nests of, for example, blue grosbeaks and great crested flycatchers. Chipping sparrows and purple finches are very fond of horsehair.
Many birds add a roof to their cup. The ovenbird gets its common name from the shape of its nest, which resembles a tiny Dutch oven. Meadowlarks build an arched entrance with a short winding path that leads to the covered nest.
The most impressively designed nests are the hanging ones. The red-eyed vireo is typical: “a beautiful pensile structure of finely woven vegetable fiber, strips of bark, grasses and cobwebs and lined with fine grasses, ornamented exteriorly with cocoons, bits of wasps’ and spiders’ nests.”
The culmination of the art is perhaps the pendant sac of the Baltimore oriole. Suspension strings are tied to the ends of branches and then plant fibers, strips of bark, horsehair are deftly woven through the suspended infrastructure. Although fragile looking, they sometimes endure the rigors of four winters.
Those more impressed by masonry than weaving can look to the swallows, who literally roll little balls of mud and mix them with straw and grass to form either cups (barn swallow) or globes (cliff swallow). Finally, the chimney swift assembles a half-cup twigs and glues it to vertical wall with spit.
Bill Chaisson has been a birdwatcher from the age of 10. He is a former managing editor of the Eagle Times and now lives and works in the town of Wilmot. Contact him at [email protected].
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