Monday, June 16, 2008
It never fails to amaze me how animals and birds can manage to adapt to living with our "modifications" to their natural environment. We've had a prime example of that right outside the door to the karate school for about a year now. Last spring two starlings built a nest in the space between the top of a support column and the roof over the walkway in front of the storefronts. Once the eggs hatched and the babies started to get bigger, the nest began to overflow the space it had been built in, so someone taped a plastic bowl to the top of the column. Incredibly, no one took it down after the starlings moved out - in fact, at some point the columns were painted and they painted over the tape and bowl so that it would better match the column! Which left a ready-made nesting site for this spring's tenants, a pair of sparrows.
I spent the morning at the school while an HVAC technician worked on the AC, and spent quite a while watching the sparrows and their babies. The male was not happy to see me inside the window of the school - whenever I was in view he would refuse to fly up to the nest and instead would hang around on the ground chirping rather loudly. But it turned out I had a pretty good view from the computer desk, so I quickly figured out the pattern - one of the sparrows would fly up, a couple of heads would pop out of the nest and open their beaks wide for whatever food the adults had brought, and then the adults would fly off to repeat the process. Over the course of the morning I managed to get some decent photos of both adults and some fuzzy photos of the babies sticking their heads out of the nest.
It will be interesting to see of the "nesting bowl" survives another year... in any case I suspect we'll be seeing nests in that spot for as long as we remain at our current location, unless the landlord or one of the tenants makes a concerted effort to eliminate them.
JMH
