A Perfect Little Nest

I am not one to seek out bird nests during the summer. Others do. My brother-in-law knows where many of the breeders have nests on his woodlot, and he makes sure to avoid them when he drives to his lean-to on top of his hill in his heavy machinery.

I do not seek out nests for several reasons. The obvious one is the nest is usually in use and I don't want to disturb the parent or the young. The only times I have found nests when they are in use is when a parent bird directs my attention to it, like the hummingbird that flew in front of me to her nest at the end of a branch hanging over a brook. I would not have seen the lichen-encrusted nest without her. She settled on her eggs.

2018 wren nest, on compost pile (Margo D. Beller)

One year I was watering a shrub against my house and a catbird flew out to the nearby spruce. That made me curious so I looked behind and, sure enough, there was the nest with its four blue eggs. I made sure to check first before watering the rest of that summer. In later summers catbirds have made nests in the tangle of shrubs on the border between my house and a neighbor.

Other bird nests I've found have been titmice flying to and from a hole high up in a tree in a neighbor's front yard, the robin that built a nest in my pear tree but didn't stay long enough to incubate eggs and the redwing blackbird that flew from a bush surrounded by water at Great Swamp, leaving its young loudly begging for more food.

More often than not, I see the young birds once they leave the nest, loudly following their parents around the yard begging for food. I don't see the nests they've left until fall when the birds have taken off for the season and the leaves fall from the shrubs or the trees, revealing them.

The best nest I know, of course, is the one in the wooden box hanging from my apple tree.

A month ago the house wrens and their young took off. A week or so later, house wrens took over the box in the next yard, and I took advantage of my vacancy to bring down as many of the remaining apples as I could, no doubt to the tree's dismay. I had hoped the nest box would be used again. However, after what seemed like 200 days of rain and knowing the southbound migration period would come too soon for another brood to be created, I finally decided to bring in the wooden structure before the rain warped and rotted it, as I found it was starting to do.

After letting it dry on the enclosed porch, I took the next rainless day to walk the box over to the compost pile to clear it out.  It took some doing because it was packed full of twigs, which I expected. However, there were some unexpected items, such as a cardinal's red feather. I chuckled to imagine the little wren sneaking up on the much bigger cardinal to pull out its feather for the nest.

I turned over the mass of twigs I pulled and found a perfect little cup. According to the good people at Cornell University's ornithology school, "the cup itself is built into a depression in the twigs and lined with just a few grams (less than 0.25 oz) of feathers, grasses and other plant material, animal hair, spider egg sacs, string, snakeskin, and discarded plastic."

My picture of it is above. No snake skins, but you can see how well it would blend into the underbrush. 

The box is not very big, and I wondered at a four- to five-inch house wren sitting in there on several eggs (anywhere from three to 10, but in my box it is more to the lower end) and then those eggs hatching, the young eventually growing so big the parents must feed them through the box' small, round opening.

But they do get through it every year. It is tight quarters, but I'd like to think the hanging house is safer than a wren nest in the wild. And they must appreciate it, if such a thing can be said for a bird, because the wrens keep coming back as long as I put the house out.