Funky Nests in Funky Places

Funky Nests 2017

/ Seth Inman / Leave a comment

a mother Costa’s Hummingbird on her nest at Villa del Faro in Baja California Sur. The rim of the nest is covered in her and/or her offspring’s droppings!

In the citizen science department of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Celebrate Urban Birds program (CUBs) holds several competitions a year revolving around a certain idea of bird celebration. We have covered the Funky Nests in Funky Places competition several times,  and back when I worked for CUBs as a Cornell undergraduate student I wrote worked behind the scenes on the competition.

Now the contest is back, and ends on June 30th!

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As Birds Start Nesting, Things Start Getting Funky

/ Seth Inman / Leave a comment

Maybe it’s already happened to you in years past: you walk into your garage, ready to take your first bike ride of the year now that it’s finally warm enough, but you lift your old helmet only to find that it is full of moss, leaves, and twigs. What?! You may think it’s a late April Fool’s joke, but actually it is the product of a lot of hard work by a small cavity-nesting bird that has found a safe place to put their home. Depending on where you live, it could be any number of species, but the most common by far are the Carolina Wren and House Wren.

Clockwise from top left, submissions are by Joe Hoelscher, David Hutchinson, Mike Smith, and Sophie Lyon.

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