Nest (#110)

Musings while gardening and house hunting. Plus, you guessed it: nest art!

We weave, together.

We weave together our bric-a-brac, our books, our scattered clothes that miss the laundry basket, our photo albums, our carefully crocheted blankets and gifted throws, our decorative but fully dysfunctional pillows that provide pops of colour like eggs in a nest.

We build all this to create a fortress of safety, our decor, our lives wrapped all around us.

And then - we break it.

The chicks fledge, and the wear and tear on the branches is suddenly more evident. There’s scuffs and smears and you realize it’s no longer a nest anymore. Can it be again? Maybe it’s time to also fledge. So we make minor touch-ups while also tending to spring yard work. And while I tease out roots, these tender pale reaching digits through dirt, shake loose their history, it’s now with the hopes that I can someday soon uproot my own.

When I place down branches in the pile of brush by the fire pit, I wonder if these interlaced boughs will bear new life, new hope, new Sunday suppers with chicks and eclectic friends around a new dinner table, and a new coziness of future falls with their diminishing light and sharpening air.

I break ground here, so that I can break ground elsewhere.

I build, so that I break and build all over again.

A European starling peeks out of their nest after delivering a meal of worms. The nest is a high-rise, drilled into the middle of a large maple tree nestled in roadside brush. You wouldn’t see the nest if you hadn’t watched the starling’s comings and goings. (Photo: Bryn Robinson, 2024)

Another lunch prepared. Their work at this time of year is never done. (Photo: Bryn Robinson, 2024)

A mourning dove sits on a low branch, just above a stream. If I hadn’t seen her fly into the nest, I wouldn’t have know she had such prime waterfront real estate. (Photo: Bryn Robinson, 2023)

Ascribing to a minimalist design aesthetic, a tree swallow removes some of the nesting material she placed in the nesting box (fixed to a telephone pole in a rural area; photo: Bryn Robinson, 2023).

Feeling the rattan and wicker look, a red-winged black bird prepares to head back to her nest with her latest finds. (Photo: Bryn Robinson, 2023)

It doesn’t look comfortable, all large sticks and jagged edges. But she’s worked very hard on creating a stable home for her children. (Photo: Bryn Robinson, 2024)

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This Week in SciArt

Sharon Beals’ Nests collections are simple in concept - images of intricate birds’ nests collected over the years by museums, photographed against black backdrops - but are impactful in providing a vehicle for raising awareness of habitat loss and climate change.

Looking through the collections she’s photographed over the years is fascinating. How can a small creature weave together such an immaculate creation in such a short amount of time?

Photograph of an Altamira Oriole nest, created by Sharon Beals; image from The Art of the Bird’s Nest, Smithsonian Magazine, 4 September 2013.

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