A TIME TO NEST

Rex Burress

Although the cold atmospheric river has hung around in Oroville, CA deep into the new year of March, 2019, the annual bird nesting season is in the air!

A certain mystic signal is given to reproduce, and that designation is adhered to whatever the weather. Wildlife rather throws caution to the wind in sexual selection, and there's even more intensity in selecting a nesting site. The competition for a favorable niche to place a nest, which involves territorial rights, leads to conflicts reminiscent of human housing and ownership. To a bird though, it is a temporary occupation with no deeds or paperwork involved, much like the Native American use of the land.

The nesting instinct starts early in the new year, if not before, when couples are reaffirming their relationships and “looking around” for the best site to house the eggs or give birth. Great Horned Owls can be heard hooting deep in the winter for a mate if he is unattached. Owls are generally quite solitaire until the reproductive urge strikes, a sequence ticking in the back of their minds, and makes itself known to most animals in the springtime, although in the human species, sexual dalliance is more or less full time! G.H. Owls are mostly monogamous, and don't build their own nests but borrow.

Nature sets aside an intense time when female animals become unavoidably “in heat” and receptive of fertilization, whether it be egg layers or live birthers. There's no stopping the microscopic sperm! And there's no stopping the parental care needed to fulfill the creation of new life.

Some bird nests are constructed with artist perfection, sticks and stems woven into clever arrangements. The hummingbird's tiny nest, not much larger than a golf-ball, is settled on a branch and pampered with moss and lichens until it looks dignified with hardly enough space for two fledglings--merely another knot on the tree.

I noticed a photograph of cormorants nesting in a small tree in February, although they begin operations of staking a location early. Generally, cormorants choose a claim on a high rock in the ocean, building a sloppy mound of seaweed and mud amid hundreds of rocks. But often they will go inland into trees, such as Lafayette Reservoir, and specially at Lake Merritt Wildlife Refuge at Oakland. It's not that the park planned for the colony, they just came, as did the black-crowned night herons back in 1972. and soon after, the egrets. Migratory diving ducks come every winter.

When the eucalyptus developed on the five islands, there were habitat takers! It may seem ironic that water birds like cormorants, or wading birds like egrets and herons, build their nests in trees, but equally amazing may be king penguins in the Antarctica laying their one egg on their feet in freezing winds! Seventy miles inland on the ice-pack too! Of course, they have no wings to escape.

Every land mass seems to have nesting birds of some kind, building some kind of nest! There are almost as many nesting ground birds as tree-nesters.!

Naturalist John Burroughs might have spoke as if the birds were for people like him, commenting “If the bird has not preached to me, it has added to the resources of my life; it has widened the field of my interests; it has afforded me another beautiful object to love, and has helped me to feel more at home in this world.”

“From the naturalist's point of view, the sole purpose of life in this world, man included, is to beget more life, and secure the perpetuity of the species. The master-instinct in every living creature is to increase and multiply and fill the world with its progeny.”

John Burroughs