Researchers across Europe have found bizarre nests bristling with the sharp metal stakes cities use to repel birds
Naturalist Auke-Florian Hiemstra has seen a lot of bird nests, but none were quite like the one he spotted in a photograph from a patient in a Belgian hospital. This nest, high in a sugar maple in the hospital’s courtyard, was massive—and looked like metal.
Hiemstra is a co-author of a new study published online July 11 in Deinsea, in which the researchers describe the Belgian nest and several similar spiky structures found across Europe: two magpie nests from Scotland and the Netherlands, and one Carrion Crow nest, also from the Netherlands.
Birds around the world use human materials in their nests in various ways, says Juan Diego Ibáñez Álamo, an urban ecologist at the University of Granada in Spain, who wasn’t involved in the new research. The use of anti-bird spikes is just an unusually ironic example of the behavior, Hiemstra says.
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