Avian Builders

Avian Architecture: How Birds Design, Engineer, and Build by (the puckishly named) Peter Goodfellow.

So what don’t birds build their nests out of? Most of us are probably familiar with the grassy/twiggy cup nests built by a number of songbirds, some lined with moss, some reinforced with mud, like the classic, omnipresent American Robin nest. But this is only one type of a dozen different architectures profiled in this book. The mud pellet nests of Barn Swallows and the sagging woven bag nests of Baltimore Orioles are easily enough seen in Prospect Park, too, along with the big mounds of Mute Swans; more obscure are the well-hidden, suspended-between-reed nests of Red-winged Blackbirds. Some birds nest in cavities they either find and repurpose or woodpecker-out themselves. Some birds, like the Peregrine Falcon, don’t make a nest at all. They just use a “scrape,” a flat ledge under some kind of overhang to protect against the elements; turns out a window ledge (55 Water Street) or bridge alcove (Gil Hodges Memorial) can do nicely as a scrape. (After the eastern subspecies of the Peregrine was exterminated by DDT, the bred-in-captivity birds that were released to replace them found the traditional wild territory dominated by larger and aggressive Great Horned Owls; so the falcons took to the mostly owl-free canyons of the cities.)

In addition to such natural materials as snakeskin, spiderweb, and, um, saliva (bird’s nest soup is made from spit nests made by swiftlets), such human creations as string, rope fibers, ribbons, and fishing line, are incorporated into nests as well. Meanwhile, Malleefowl bury their eggs in a huge earthen mound that tops a pile of rotting vegetation; the composting heat of the vegetation keeps the eggs warm. Then you get to the Bowerbirds of northern Australia and New Guinea; the males build elaborate “bowers” (not nests, these are just for show), often incorporating brightly colored objects, to woo females. The likes of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid have surely seen these swooping, twisty, glittering creations.

This is a slim book, fully illustrated, full of examples; it’s a wonderful exploration of the variety of evolutionary strategies birds use to… carry on. If you’re one of those human-centric types ass-headedly sure it doesn’t get any better than us (“What fools these mortals be!”), the author nicely shows how avian architecture corresponds to the principles of human architecture, or is that vice-versa?