Laura Erickson's For the Birds

Miguel de Cervantes wrote in Don Quixote, “‘Tis the part of a wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not venture all his eggs in one basket.” That may be sound advice for a man, but it simply doesn’t work for birds—they follow Mark Twain’s “Put all your eggs in the one basket and — WATCH THAT BASKET.”

Birds put so very much time and focus into selecting a nest site and constructing the nest because producing and incubating eggs and then brooding, feeding, protecting, and educating their chicks is so very critical. Despite all their diligence, the mortality rate for eggs and nestlings is even higher than that of human babies and children before we could protect them from at least some causes of mortality with vaccinations and carseats.

That high nest failure rate is why from the start of my birding life I’ve avoided looking for nests. The first nest I ever found on my own, a Mourning Dove nest near where we were living in April or May 1976, had two beautiful white eggs in it, but the next day, when I peeked at it, the eggs were gone. Within a few seconds I saw the broken eggs under the nest—they’d fallen through the loose weave of the bottom. I was relieved that I hadn’t led any predators to it or otherwise caused the nest failure, and quickly researched the fact that flimsy nests are a problem for some Mourning Doves, but it was still heartbreaking.

As a small child, I stopped walking on grass because I imagined all the tiny insects, worms, and other creatures I might crush. That put our swing set, in the back of our yard, out of reach until my big brother Jimmy, knowing how much I loved to swing, excitedly took me outside one morning—he’d scrounged up some rocks and bricks and made a rock path to the swing set just for me.

I got over much of that reluctance as an adult, but in 1976 when Russ and I went on a Michigan Audubon field trip to see Greater Prairie-Chickens booming, my exhilaration at seeing these magnificent birds was diminished as we learned how rare they were in the state—indeed they would be wiped out within just a few years. When one of my birding friends told me that he had long ago accidentally stepped on a prairie chicken nest, crushing those precious eggs—well, that did it for me. The very thought of crushing a ground nest—maybe even a precious Le Conte’s Sparrow nest—has kept me on paths and roads my entire adult life, one of many reasons I wouldn’t have cut it as a field researcher.

I’ve also heard of and read several accounts of nest predators finding nests and stealing eggs or chicks by tracking ornithologists and other nest observers. That put the kibosh on my ever wanting to search for nests myself. While I was at Cornell, I got photos of chickadee nests while accompanying one of the researchers, but she assured me their nest tube design was as predator-proof as it could possibly be, and she was going to be checking them whether or not I was along.

Next time I’ll talk about the few nests I have closely observed over the years, some succeeding wonderfully, but one just this week failing tragically.