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Two summers in the past, a affected person looking his Belgian-hospital window spied in a tree an odd, deserted magpie nest of plastic and wire. He had, by coincidence, simply learn a newspaper article a few Dutch biologist who research chicken nests constructed of trash. So he dashed off an e-mail, and that Dutch biologist, Auke-Florian Hiemstra, was quickly within the hospital courtyard, climbing aboard a cherry picker to see the nest up shut.
From this aerial vantage level, Hiemstra famous that the plastic-mounted wires had been really anti-bird spikes—no less than 1,500 of them, he later counted—knit collectively right into a “fortress.” The hospital had put in such spikes to discourage landings on its roof, however in areas closest to the nest, that they had gone lacking. There had been solely remnants of the glue that when held the spikes in place, as if somebody—some chicken—had wrested them free. Hiemstra has discovered some shocking stuff in chicken nests earlier than: condoms, face masks, paper packages for cocaine, items of windshield wipers. But this was actually the weirdest. A chicken nest made from anti-bird spikes? “It sounds like basically a joke,” he advised me.
What’s extra, the magpie nest’s spikes had been arrayed outward, as if to scare off different birds. Had the homeowners of this nest really repurposed our anti-bird defenses for themselves? Magpies do usually collect thorny branches—even breaking them from bushes—to defend their massive nests from predators. “In urban environments, there are not that many thorny branches. Or at least there’s a good alternative—namely, anti-bird spikes,” speculated Hiemstra, a Ph.D. candidate on the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, in Leiden, the Netherlands. In our bid to maintain pesky birds away, we could have handed one species a novel protection.
Hiemstra, whose large halo of curly hair can resemble a chicken’s nest, started eagerly sharing this discovery with biologist mates. Not lengthy thereafter, one among them was contacted by a tree-maintenance employee who discovered one other nest made from anti-bird spikes, this time constructed by crows in a tree only a brief drive away from Leiden, in Rotterdam. (This nest, in distinction, had spikes going through inward, so it’s unlikely the crows had been additionally utilizing them defensively.) Then one other magpie nest with spikes on prime turned up in Glasgow, Scotland. And a 3rd one in Enschede, the Netherlands. “More and more kept popping up,” Hiemstra advised me. Wherever there are anti-bird spikes and wherever there are crows and magpies, he mentioned, extra anti-spike nests are possible ready to be discovered. The discovery that appeared so uncommon at first was maybe not so uncommon in spite of everything; scientists simply began paying consideration.
Plenty of different synthetic materials leads to the nests of birds. Hiemstra had began finding out this phenomenon after following a coot carrying a bit of plastic to its nest. Tim Birkhead, an ornithologist who wrote a e-book about magpies, advised me by way of e-mail that he’s seen magpie nests in Sheffield, England, made from metallic wire. A current evaluation of why some birds use “anthropogenic materials” famous that trash has been discovered within the nests of 176 completely different species, on each continent apart from Antarctica. “We were surprised at just how many species use man-made materials,” says Mark Mainwaring, an ornithologist at Bangor University, in Wales, who co-authored the evaluation. Birds are adaptable, added his co-author Jim Reynolds, an ornithologist on the University of Birmingham, in England. “Why would birds travel miles and miles and miles to find nesting materials if there’s material closer by?” These nests filled with synthetic supplies are reminders of how completely people have modified birds’ habitats: We’ve cleared them of native vegetation, littered them with plastic, and even blanketed them with hostile spikes.
Until now, although, scientists had been solely dimly conscious of how a lot birds have been interacting with the very objects meant to shoo them away. Hiemstra couldn’t discover a lot about it within the revealed literature. But when he took to the better web, he discovered a trove of viral movies and articles celebrating the triumph of birds: Cockatoos have been identified to tear spikes off of buildings too; peregrine falcons skewer their prey leftovers on the spikes to avoid wasting for later; a chicken dubbed the “Parkdale Pigeon” achieved folk-hero standing for stubbornly constructing a nest atop anti-bird spikes in Australia. Far from being merely deterred by our spikes, birds have repurposed, reused, and resisted. Maybe utilizing stronger glue to maintain the spikes in place is feasible, Hiemstra mused, however he doesn’t need to give humanity any concepts: “I’m definitely cheering for the birds.”