Blog by Melanie Beck, Strumpshaw Fen Volunteer
The Norwich Nuthatches’ April meeting was on a beautiful warm, sunny, spring morning and it was all about nests! John started the meeting by showing us some pictures of the unusual places that birds have made their nests. It was hard to believe that a bird would choose to make its nest in a traffic cone, in a post box or on the wheel of a police car. But there were pictures to prove it!
John then set us the task of matching pictures of nests with the bird or animal that built it. They included an osprey, harvest mouse, long-tailed tit and a gorilla- I didn’t even know they made nests!! We then looked at some real nests. They were different sizes and shapes and showed how they were suited to different birds. The goldfinch nest was very small and not very deep, while the blackbird’s nest was quite scruffy. The song thrush’s nest was beautifully lined and the reed warbler nest was very deep and joined to two reeds where it would keep it out of the water in a reed bed. Please remember you must never move a nest in case there are birds trying to raise a family. All of the nests we saw had stopped being used by the birds at the end of the breeding season and carefully removed by adults after asking advice from experts.
Next we played some games looking at unnatural materials. For the first John had two trays holding a total of 12 things between them. It was quite a strange collection including a notebook, string, sunglasses, socks and a football shirt. We had a few minutes to look at them and then they were taken away and we had to write down as many as we could remember. Not as easy as you may think although some of the children had really good memories and got them all. John then asked us to think about what all the items had in common. It turned out that they were all found in a bird’s nest – and not just any bird but that of a red kite!! Many of us knew that magpies build their nests with things that had caught their eye but we weren’t expecting it to be a red kite!
The next game took us into the woods where John and I had set up an unnatural trail. Keeping with the idea of things that you don’t expect to find in a nest, hidden along a hedge were ten things that shouldn’t be there. The children had to walk along the hedge counting how many they could find and to whisper to me or John how many they had spotted. If they were wrong then they had to start again! It took a while before anyone got close and well done to Ruby who was the first to find all ten. It proved quite a challenge and not everyone found them all. Some were easier to find like the sweet wrapper, pencil, toy owl and dragonfly clip. The hardest to find was a mirror propped up so all that was reflected were leaves and a piece of copper wire wound round a branch.
The last task of the day was to collect natural material and have a go at making our own nests. Weaving some of the bendy branches found on the wood floor made the base and the leaves and moss lined it well. It wasn’t as easy as we had expected. All that was left was our craft activity, to make our own birds to live in the nests. They looked fantastic. And a match for anything a bird could make!
The activities showed us all just how amazing birds are to make their nests with only their beak to weave the different materials together, however unusual they may be. What a fantastic morning!