Fifty Nests and the Birds that Built Them
By Sharon Beals
Like many of you, a bird song, when heard above the urban pulse or the din of my mind, always gives me keen comfort, a reason to pause and wonder at those improbable notes, and to wash my eyes with the landscape of trees and sky to find its singer.
Regrettably, it was years before I finally picked up binoculars to match more of the songs I was hearing to their singers. Guided by informed birders, I slowly began to parse the details of identification and habits: which hummingbird was an Allen’s or an Anna’s by its flight; where to look to actually see a Swainson’s Thrush; which pond in Golden Gate Park might harbor a Green Heron and where the latest brood of Great Horned Owls might be on display—the baby steps of a locally ranging neophyte birder.
It was the power of a book that turned mere identification into an unabashedly born-again passion. Scott Weidensaul’s moving and illuminating study of migration, Living on the Wind, was my awakening. Along with his accounts of birds banded, studied, or just observed in wonder on a world tour of research and researchers, he describes the senses and navigational cues that birds use to find their way on journeys that for some species can only be described as heroic. Navigating by stars, magnetic fields, or polarized light, with no other guidance than some inherited instinct, almost all first-year young will migrate with no parental guidance––some of them hemisphere to hemisphere distances. The miles flown by a small but long-lived Arctic Tern can be equal to three trips to the moon and back. Half-ounce Blackpoll Warblers catch the trade winds far out in the Atlantic and fly for 2000 miles without rest, food, or water. But besides describing how birds manage to accomplish these astonishing feats, he makes clear their need for the habitat that fuels and protects them along the way, and at either end of their passages.
Galvanized, I have become what I call a theoretical birder, one with a very short life list but on a quest to learn what birds need to be sustained both locally and globally. Yet how I could use my skills to say what was keening in my heart eluded me. It was only after making the first photograph of a nest, drawn to its palette and messy, yet graceful and functional form, that I knew I had found my medium––or at least a way that I could be a medium for the birds. I offer these photographs as a bowerbird lures a mate, with the hope that others will be as seduced as I to wonder and learn about the birds that built them.
I was drawn to photograph a few of these nests, collected long ago, simply for their form or the color of the eggs, only to discover that they had been built by a member of a species now so rare that we cannot be alarmed enough at their endangered status.
If you share my concern for these threatened birds, and want to keep others off that list, you might care to learn what has been made so clear to me: that so many of the decisions I make in my own daily life affect their survival. What I plant in my yard, what coffee I buy, what I put down my drain or into the atmosphere, or where I let my dog and cat wander, all of this matters. A lot.
Ninety-five percent of birds depend on insects to feed themselves and their offspring during breeding season. With an undeniably warming climate, this avian fuel is hatching earlier, often before the birds return to their breeding grounds. The nesting success of many species is already being affected. To add more urgency to this survival story, in North America we are down to a mere five percent of that buggy native habitat. Only a very few insects, and most of them alien imports themselves, can live off picture-perfect lawns, or the non-native and often invasive plants that seduce us at our local nurseries. So to feed the insects, and thus the birds, I have learned what once grew in my neighborhood, and planted it, some of it quite lovely—now home to some chattering, tsip-tsiping, trilling, and hopefully nesting songsters.
So much of how we affect birds is invisible to us from a distance; the wood for our floors and furniture is harvested somewhere, often irreplaceably. Our oh-so-soft brand-name tissues come from the last arboreal forests in Canada. The fruit we savor out of season was most likely grown on land once covered by a rainforest – and the same goes for coffee.
I know I am beating this drum of concern late in a parade of conservationists who have been trying for a good part of a century to awaken us to planet-protecting changes that we all could, and need, to make. But these are changes that would also benefit our avian treasures, so please bear with me while I shout a few again: Learn about how much carbon you are putting into the atmosphere, and change that. And how much chemistry is innocently put into the water, never to be removed, in a culture obsessed with scent, beauty, and microbes? Be a miser with that water (imagine it was carried home on your head). Simply use less stuff, especially plastic, and think about what everything you buy was made of, how far it was shipped, or if you might find it used. Tear up the lawn, and beg your nursery to provide locally native plants and trees. If you find people who are restoring a habitat, get on some gloves and join them, and while you are there, turn your eyes to the trees and sky and see who is there, and listen to their song.