By now, some of you readers have discovered that I mislabeled the nest of eggs in last week’s column as being a phoebe’s nest when it should have been a chickadee’s nest. Haste makes mistakes. This spring I faithfully checked a pair of chickadees that raised their young in a birdhouse in our back yard. The young birds left the nest with some unintentional help from me. |
The birdhouse, which was made by an Amish man from the Lock Haven Area, has a drawer that can be pulled out to check the nest inside. I always knocked on the house before opening the drawer to make sure the adult chickadees were not inside.
Now, I knew the young birds were getting old enough to leave the nest, so when I knocked on the house and heard no response, I slowly opened the drawer, and much to my surprise an adult flew out, followed by eight young birds. The young birds flew in all directions, reminding me of a time many years ago when I flushed a covey
of quail.
One young bird landed on the ground, and with the many stray cats in our neighborhood, I feared the young bird would be caught by one of the cats. I was about to pick up the young bird to place it on a tree branch when the bird flew up into the tree. In a few seconds, the male and female adults began circling (very closely) my head, while calling frantically. Their calling brought a cat bird in to help drive away the
danger, “ME”. So, I decided to leave. About a half hour later I went out to check on the birds and found that the adults had called all of the young up into our large Norway maple tree. After telling my friend Ron
Young, who is a birder, that I felt really bad about what I had done, he told me that the young birds were probably ready to leave the nest.
Bird nests range from grave scrapes, which are shallow cups, made by adult birds, such as killdeer; large platform nests built in tree tops by hawks and herons; floating nests built by grebes; nests built under the ground by birds, such as kingfishers, and others, such as woodpeckers, build their nests in tree cavities.
The materials that nests are made of are just as diverse. Some birds,such as barn swallows and phoebes, build their nests out of mud and use mud to plaster the nests to vertical surfaces of either walls or cliffs.
These nests are known as adherent nests. The chimney swifts glue their adherent nests with saliva. The vireos build what are known as pensile nests that are found hanging from the forks of tree branches. Orioles weave baglike nests known as pendulous nests, which are suspended from the tips of branches. Some nests are made from sticks by birds, such as ospreys, blue herons and eagles. The largest nest on record in North America was built by a bald eagle. In Ohio, an eagle’s nest (aerie), which was continuously occupied by eagles for 35 years, was estimated to weigh two tons. Eventually, the nest became too heavy and crashed to the ground. In St. Petersburg, Florida, one eagle’s nest was known to be twenty feet deep and nine and a half feet across.
The largest nests in the world are built by the megapodes of Australia.
These birds scratch up mounds of debris, sometimes as high as seven feet to twenty feet in diameter; however, the record for these birds is fifteen feet high and fifty feet in diameter. These large mounds are the work of many generations of birds.
Occasionally, females of the same species will share a nest; incubate their eggs together and care for the young after they are hatched.
Although there have been many reports of females sharing a nest, the most prevalent is the wood duck. When natural cavities for nesting are scarce, the wood duck readily uses the nesting boxes provided. If nesting boxes are placed too closely together, many females lay eggs in the nests of other females.
There is also what are referred to as dump nests, a term used by
biologists for a nest in which more than one hen bird lays its eggs.
Several female ring-neck pheasants could by necessity lay their eggs on the ground or in a dump nest, lacking one of their own. After development in the oviduct of the female, an egg apparently cannot be stopped and must be laid. Usually, the eggs found in a dump nest are not
incubated. Some dump nests used by the redhead duck have been known to contain 30 to 37 eggs.
Recently, Jerry Frantz, of Springfield Township, told me that he saw a turkey’s nest that contained 23 eggs. After checking one week later (the last week of spring turkey season), he found that fourteen of the twenty-three eggs had hatched. Unfortunately, the nine remaining eggs
did not hatch. Jerry never saw the hen with the chicks.