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By Root 1310 0

Within the cattails I found a half-dozen red-winged blackbird nests and three common grackle nests. They were all within several inches of the ice in the wilted, now-dry cattail leaves. The long-discarded bulky nests of catbirds and cedar waxwings were still visible in tangles of thin twigs where in the summer they were almost totally hidden in the dense foliage. The catbird nests were built of long twigs and robust plant stems, but the almost invisible signature that distinguishes them from similar nests (blue jay, rose-breasted grosbeak) is strips of grape bark. The one cedar waxwing nest I found was, as is typical, decorated with green moss. The low twiggy spiraea bushes revealed the flimsy grass nests of chestnut-sided warblers and also a yellow warbler nest made of cattail seedfluff felted together into a deep fluffy cottony cup. Goldfinches had left their plant-down-upholstered nests in the more open-standing young trees and bushes.

An elm tree along the beaver bog edge held the almost perfectly preserved baglike nest of a northern oriole. Its weave of tough plant fibers that surely rival those of hemp (which I found in decaying milkweed stems) allowed it to be suspended in the wind-whipped tip of a long thin twig where nest-raiding squirrels seldom travel. Near ground level I also noticed a jagged hole through the thin, tough bark of a rotten gray birch stub. It was the entrance to the nest cavity excavated by a black-capped chickadee. All Paridae, or tits, the family to which chickadees belong, hide their eggs in enclosed spaces. Chickadees have small weak bills yet they commonly hammer out their own nest hole in soft rotting wood. They sometimes use preexisting cavities instead, such as those made by a woodpecker. Within them they build a soft nest of moss, hair, and feathers.

Catbird nest in willow with nightshade vine.

Building material often dictates architecture and gives new options for unique nest sites. Barn and cliff swallows, for example, can place their nest on inaccessible cliffs (usually in dense communities of dozens of nests), essentially constructing their own often reusable stucco birdhouses out of mud mortar that remind me of Anasazi cliff dwellings, making one wonder if Anasazi were inspired by cliff swallows. Inside the swallows’ reusable mini-birdhouses (which are generally considered the nests) they build their nests of grass and feathers. Because of the mortar exterior that can be glued onto any solid substrate, many swallows can nest as readily on a cliff as on a barn wall. In contrast, bank swallows dig holes into sand-banks and within them build their grass-and-feather nests at the end of sandy tunnels. Tree swallows use instead the old nest holes woodpeckers have hammered into trees. Chimney swifts make a shallow nest cup by using their saliva to glue one little twig after another in parallel, forming a thin bare shelf onto the chimney wall. Their relatives, the cave swiftlets in Asia, have dispensed with twigs and build their whole nest out of saliva. (The coagulated hardened bird spit is considered a dining delicacy, since it is an expensive Asian restaurant item.)

Chestnut-sided warbler nest in spiraea bushes.

Chestnut-sided warbler nest in spiraea, roofed over with Clematis seeds. With seventy-six cherry pits stored inside. A deer mouse larder.

As I continued my walk and looked around for fascinating nests in the woods and bog on this snowy day, I found nothing quite as exotic as swift or swallow nests. Instead I found several nests belonging to chestnut-sided warblers. As is typical for this species, the nests were small, round, cup-shaped structures built of fine grass and situated in low spiraea bushes. To my great surprise, however, I found one nest that was domed over and it had a small round entrance hole to the side, reminding me of a wren’s nest. But this nest was just another typical grass nest of a chestnut-sided warbler, with a superstructure of plant down that had been added later by some other animal. Inside were 76 black cherry pits. After this surprising