Fittingly for an ornithologically-named site, my first story of the week is about birds. In an ode to irony (or the birdy version of a raised middle finger), crows and magpies are repurposing bird-deterring metal spikes from urban trees as construction material for their nests.
📷 Crows are members of the corvid family, which also includes magpies, ravens and jays. Photo by Ian Kirk from Broadstone, Dorset, UK, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Putting spikes in trees to prevent birds from perching on branches is appalling. Sure, nobody wants their car covered in bird shit, but is this really the best solution our giant human brains can come up with? If we prioritized coexisting with nature rather than just seeking cheap and easy solutions, we might come up with something slightly more nuanced than a spike.
Fortunately crows and magpies are a bit more creative, especially the cunning maggies who’ve figured out pointy things make pretty good barricades so place them on the rooves of their nests to keep predators at bay.
One of my favourite aspects of this story is that birds aren’t just using discarded spikes they’ve stumbled upon in garbage tips, but are actively seeking them out and removing them to use for their own ends. That’s a level of fuckery that’d make a cockatoo proud.
Read the full story, Crows and magpies using anti-bird spikes to build nests, researchers find by Ian Sample on the Guardian, published 12 July 2023.
Leave a Reply