Birds are using anti-bird spikes to make their nests

Spikes positioned on buildings to discourage birds are being utilized by birds to construct nests in a number of places round Europe.

“It sounds like a joke,” says Auke-Florian Hiemstra on the Naturalis Biodiversity Center within the Netherlands. “But it’s kind of heart-warming that these birds are actually outsmarting us and using anti-bird material for their own benefits.”

Birds usually use thorny branches as nest materials, generally inserting them as a roof to thrust back predators and shield their younger. In cities, nevertheless, there’s a lack of prickly branches round, so a couple of birds have turned to anti-bird spikes.

So far, Hiemstra and his colleagues have noticed this behaviour in carrion crows (Corvus corone) at one website within the Netherlands and in Eurasian magpies (Pica pica) at websites in Belgium, the Netherlands and Scotland.

In a tree close to a hospital in Antwerp, Belgium, a magpie made a nest containing round 1500 metallic spikes. The spikes on the aspect of the constructing closest to the tree had been gone, whereas these on the opposite aspect had been nonetheless intact. This means that the birds have been ripping the spikes out, versus accumulating free spikes.

The researchers have additionally seen magpie nests with defensive domes containing barbed wire and knitting needles.

They hope to search out out whether or not the spike-laden nests are higher at defending chicks than common ones. “Is there more breeding success when birds build nests with the anti-bird spikes? It could be possible, but for that now we have just too low of a number of observations,” says Hiemstra.

“We really hope that people start looking at nests more closely, so we can find more of these examples,” he says.

Journal reference: Deinsea