Home Tweet Home: Some Ingenious Building Techniques

Home Tweet Home: Some Ingenious Building Techniques

By Mr. Ghaz, December 19, 2009

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Home Tweet Home: Some Ingenious Building Techniques

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For every creature a home is an important factor. It provides protection from predators and affords shelter from the elements. Birds, in particular, devote considerable time to creating a suitable abode. The vast majority build their own nests, although there are some exceptions. For example, some owls use a hollow in a tree, and most falcons and nightjars dispense with a nest altogether and lay their eggs on bare earth.

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Throughout the world one finds an extremely wide range of different types of nest, tailored to meet the specific needs of the birds in their local climates and to offer protection from the potential dangers of their environments.

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Black Tern: Nature to northern and arctic regions, the black tern builds a free-floating nest on freshwater marches.

Feathering the Nest

Most bird’s nests are built of twigs, grass, or leaves bound together with mud, saliva, or even threads taken from spiderwebs. Usually the nests from whatever materials they can find, in one North American osprey nest were three shirts, a bath towel, an arrow, and a garden rake.

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Many birds have developed ingenious of grass or twigs like basketwork; the homes of penduline tits in Africa, which are closely related to titmice of the Masai tribe use the nests as purses. The gregarious weaverbirds of the Kalahari Desert weave communal nests that are the avian equivalent of apartment nests that are the avian equivalent of apartment houses; one nest may have as many as 500 individual bird dwellings, each with its own entrance.

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Tailorbirds, a familiar sight in India, have devised as unusual method. Using their beak as a needle, they can make a pocket for the nest by literally sewing two living leaves together without detaching the leaves from the tree.

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Gray Fantail: Snug within the confines of their cup-shaped nests.

Safety in the Home

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Most people think of nests as being cup or bowl-shaped, but that is not always the case. Birds are talented architects and use sophisticated structures to outwit predators or to keep their eggs at the correct temperature for incubation whatever the external conditions.

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Ovenbirds, for instance, build almost spherical nests, comprising an antechamber, with access from one small entrance. Their common name is derived from the resemblance of their nests to the clay ovens of the local inhabitants. Found in the tropics of Central and South America, ovenbirds build nests during the rainy season, when supplies of the soft mud they use are plentiful.

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Ovenbird: Territorial by nature, the ovenbird often builds its nest in hig places so that it can keep a watchful eye on intruders. The nest is made of plants, animal hair, and dung: mud is an effective finding agent

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In Africa the hammerhead bird builds a nests that may be up to six feet wide; it houses three internal chambers, with the entrance at the bottom. Eggs are incubated in the top chamber, the safest from both predators and flooding. When the eggs are hatched and the chicks outgrow their nursery, they move down to the middle chamber. The lowest chamber serves as an entrance hall.

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The African gray-capped social weaverbird has developed an even more sophisticated design. Its nest features an emergency escape route that occupants can use. If a predator gains access through the main entrance.

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But perhaps one of the most extraordinary nests is built in the rid regions of Australia by the mallee fowl, which has to contend with temperatures that range from below freezing to more than 100 ° F during its breeding season. The male buries the eggs under a huge mound of sand, into which it pushes leaves and twigs. The decaying vegetation generates heat that keeps the eggs warm.

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The male mallee tends the eggs for the incubation period, which lasts several months. In warm weather he piles on sand to protect the eggs from the heat; when it is cold, he scrapes away some of height of 3 feet and a width of as much as 15 feet, the nest of the mallee fowl is believed to be the largest in the world.