Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
A sizeable fraction of ornithology involves watching nests. For me, in this
neighborhood under construction, i nding nests and following their fates was
the i rst step in understanding whether the amazing diversity of subirdia was
sustainable. I was dubious; regardless of where a bird nests, producing free-
l ying young from a set of eggs is rare. I'd often watched predators take a nest,
heard from residents about the loss of their favorite robin brood, and learned
about the frequent predation on urban nests from the writings of my colleagues.
All this information suggested that any eggs lucky enough to be laid in an ur-
ban nest would be quickly slurped up by roving jays, rooks, currawongs, or
crows. If an egg survived undetected long enough to hatch, then a maraud-
ing squirrel, coon, stoat, or fox would gladly add it to its general diet. In the
rare event that a chick grew to the point that it was able to stretch its wings
and l edge from the coni nes of the dangerous nest, then the neighborhood
tabby would dispatch it and proudly trophy it home to its owner. To see all
this drama, I had to i nd nests and monitor their output, so I looked in the
bushes and on the ground, scanned the tree canopy with my binoculars,
and waded deep into the briars to examine any clump that might conceal a
cup of eggs.
Despite my inability to i nd the bushtit nest, it had been a good i rst month
of the nest-searching season. By looking in likely places and attending to the
behavior of parental birds—noting especially where they carried beaks full of
nesting materials or wads of food for chicks—I'd already found sixteen nests
of eight dif erent species. I checked on each one every few days. When the
parents were away, I'd peek in from a distance with an old car side-view mir-
ror fastened to a stick to count eggs or chicks. Afraid of attracting undo atten-
tion to my prize, I never marked a nest site in the i eld, but I recorded each
one's location on a paper map and also consigned it to memory. As expected
by now, several had failed; the previous week a Douglas squirrel poked its
head out of a tree cavity where a few days earlier I had listened to the begging
cries of a red-breasted sapsucker's growing brood. Probably the same hungry
