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https://www.audubon.org/magazine/apparently-magpies-and-crows-are-using-anti-bird-spikes-make-their-nests>
"Humans have made the world less hospitable for birds in many ways. One obvious
and intentional example of this can be found in towns and cities worldwide:
anti-bird spikes. The pointy wires you might see attached to roofs, ledges, and
light poles are meant to deter urban species like pigeons from landing,
pooping, and even nesting where people don’t want them to. But in an avian act
of poetic justice, a handful of European birds have struck back.
Apparently Carrion Crows and Eurasian Magpies are stealing and repurposing the
spikes as a nest-building material. Nests featuring the deterrent were
documented in a study published Tuesday in the Dutch journal
Deinsea, an
online periodical from the Natural History Museum Rotterdam.
Many birds are known to use human-made elements in their nests. In fact, 176
different species have been documented nest building with synthetic materials,
according to another study published this week in the journal
Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society B. Yet the birds in the Dutch study are
exceptional for having taken something so purposefully built to minimize their
presence and using it to rear the next generation.
“It feels very rebellious,” says Auke-Florian Hiemstra, lead study author and a
biologist researching animal architecture at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center
in Leiden, Netherlands. Kevin McGowan, an ornithologist who studies corvid
behavior at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and wasn’t involved in the new
research, agrees. The behavior conveys a “sort of a Bugs Bunny attitude,”
McGowan says—though he wasn’t particularly surprised to see magpies or crows
using the spikes in this way. As he explains, both are smart species and other
studies have demonstrated corvids’ abilities to recognize the function and use
of different materials.
In the Tuesday publication, Hiemstra and his co-researchers describe three
Eurasian Magpie nests and one Carrion Crow nest that heavily incorporated
anti-bird spikes into their construction. These four nests were found between
2021 and 2023, each in a different European city: Rotterdam and Enschede in The
Netherlands, Glasgow, Scotland, and Antwerp, Belgium. In addition, the
researchers also came across one previously documented 2009 instance of a
Carrion Crow nest building with roost-deterrent wires—one of many other names
for the spikes—in their literature review."
Via Esther Schindler, who wrote "The article has some cool photos."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
