The Most Metal Bird Nests You’ll Ever See
Magpies are using anti-bird spikes for their own purposes.
Two summers ago, a patient looking out his Belgian-hospital window spied in a tree an odd, abandoned magpie nest of plastic and wire. He had, by coincidence, just read a newspaper article about a Dutch biologist who studies bird nests built of trash. So he dashed off an email, and that Dutch biologist, Auke-Florian Hiemstra, was soon in the hospital courtyard, climbing aboard a cherry picker to see the nest up close.
From this aerial vantage point,—had wrested them free. Hiemstra has found some surprising stuff in bird nests before: condoms, face masks, paper packages for cocaine, pieces of windshield wipers. But this was truly the weirdest. A bird nest made of anti-bird spikes? “It sounds like basically a joke,” he told me.
