There have been a couple of ravens hanging around the last few weeks, and I wondered if they had decided to nest in the area. I went to spend time watching them today to see what they were up to. When I arrived in the area where they were, my suspicions were confirmed. I immediately heard the snap of a limb, and a raven flew out of a tree with a medium-sized twig. They were regularly making trips into nearby trees and breaking off branches. I watched them for an hour and a half, and I never saw them search for nesting material on the ground. The nest is next to the trunk about two-thirds up in an old evergreen tree. It was amusing to see them fly back to the nesting site. As they approached the site, they would sort of crash land in to the branches. You could hear their wings hitting the limbs as they flew into the tree. Also, they were very vocal as they flew in and out building the nest, almost as if they were fussing about how to construct it. I wasn't able to get a good photograph during that time, because there were only brief windows of opportunities as they flew through the canopy and they stayed fairly obscured from view as they looked for sticks. It will be interesting to see how ravens nesting in the area will affect the nesting of other birds nearby.
Nest Box - House Wren
There are nest boxes dotted around the arboretum, and I volunteered to clean them out this year. When I got to this box, I knew it was stuffed full of sticks, because I watched a house wren build a nest in there last summer. I did a drawing as I observed him industriously find sticks and carry them back to the box. Even so, I was amazed at how many sticks were in the box when I opened the front. They were woven so tightly together that it took some effort to pull the nest out. I was curious as to how many sticks were in there, so I put the nest in a bucket and carried it home to count them. There were well over 500, but I want to be conservative in case some were broken in the process of removing the nest. That number is not counting the little nest on top that was made of smaller sticks, grass, pine needles, rootlets, leaves and whatnot.
I just have to wonder, what is the purpose of all these sticks? There is only a small opening into the nest which you can see at the top. The Cornell Lab’s All About Birds had this to say about their nests: “House Wrens pile twigs into the cavities they choose to nest in, either to make a bed on which to build a soft-lined cup, or sometimes mounded up into a barrier between nest and entrance, seemingly to protect the nest from cold weather, predators, or cowbirds.”
Also, to my surprise, there were wasps wintering over inside this fortress of twigs. There were 12 of them huddled together staying warm and dry. It is my understanding that the only wasps that survive the winter are the mated queens which will start new nests in the spring. I find it fascinating that they somehow find a place to be together. Are the queens clustered together from the same nest or a couple of different nests? There were two other nest boxes full of sticks that were used by house wrens, and they also had wasps inside them.
