It’s the Mad Max dream of a bird’s nest: A menacing composite of metal, clay, twig and plastic.
The nest is one of five found in Europe, each one decorated with antibird spikes, Hiemstra and his colleagues report July 11 in Deinsea. The pointy strips of bird-deterrent materials normally line eaves in cities around the world. Now, they line some birds’ homes.
The study started when a hospital patient in Antwerp looked out his window and saw the nest in question. He sent a picture to Hiemstra, who researches nests and plastic pollution at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, Netherlands (SN: 4/12/21). After breeding season, Hiemstra and his team travelled to collect the nest and take it back to the lab for study. As he wrote up his report of the nest, he was tipped off to four more similar bird nests in cities in the Netherlands and Scotland.
The nests belonged to Eurasian magpies (Pica pica) and carrion crows (Corvus corone). The crows used the spikes as part of the structure of their nests (SN: 5/12/22). But Hiemstra believes the magpies employed them much as they were originally intended: to ward off other birds.
2023-07-17 06:00:00
Post from www.sciencenews.org
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