Celebrating Nests

Every October Birdlife Australia (originally the Royal Australasian Ornithologists' Union, then Birds Australia and most recently Birdlife, since a merger with Bird Observers' Club of Australia) declares a Bird Week. This week is it. This year the theme is nests; see here for more information. Here is my own contribution; just a selection of different types of nests, with regard to structure, position and building materials.

A nest can be anything from literally nothing at all, to the most complex structure conceivable. And imagine building such a structure using primarily your teeth! (Birds carry material in either beak or claws, but generally do the construction with the beak only.)

So, it can be the most rudimentary scrape, for disguise:

Red-capped Plover nest, Comerong Island.

 or a lined indentation or ground scrape:

Southern Lapwing, Torres del Paine National Park, Chile.

or an existing hollow:

Chilean Flicker chick, Torres del Paine National Park, Chile.

Scarlet Macaws, Peruvian Amazonia.

or an excavated burrow:

Magellanic Penguin and chick, Seno Otway, Chilean Patagonia.

Pied Kingfisher, Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda.

Then there are the wonderfully complex constructed nests, which may be hanging:

White-throated Gerygone, Canberra.

Yellow-rumped Casique, Manu National Park, Peru; build huge colonial grass nests.

Or in a fork:

Patogonian Tyrant on nest, Alerce Andino National Park, southern Chile.
This was one of the most beautiful nests I ever saw, heavily disguised with mosses.

Or on a branch, perhaps of sticks:

Black-faced Cuckoo-shrike, Canberra.

Or a wonderful mud construction:

Fairy Martin nests, south-west Queensland.

White-winged Choughs, Forbes, New South Wales.

Or a massive stick construction on a rock stack:

Ospreys, Eyre Peninsula, South Australia.

Or even floating on water, where the heat from decomposing vegetation helps incubate the eggs:

Australasian Grebes, Canberra.

Black Swan, Batemans Bay, New South Wales.

And of course this is only a glimpse at some of the solutions that birds have derived to cope with the problem of protecting and incubating their eggs, and later their chicks. More another day - but meantime, in southern Australia at least, this is the time to go and look at some!