Sunday, May 25, 2008

Modern Nest-Building: Baltimore Oriole



The female Baltimore Oriole, not content with traditional nest materials, gathers plastic strips with which to build her nest.

As I sat watching, she made numerous trips, each time returning with these plastic strips. After surveying her surroundings, she would hop into her nest and weave the new material into the nest basket that was taking shape.

During this time the male kept his distance except when another bird happened to stop in the nest tree, then he would arrive calling loudly, fluttering and diving until the intruder left. He repeated this tactic each time visitors dropped by with but one exception, the cat-birds. For reasons only known to him, he completely ignored a pair of catbirds who spent quite a few minutes catching and eating caterpillars.

5 comments:

my little corner said...

Amazing shot the colors are so bright......
you have a great blog

Anonymous said...

I like these birds a lot and managed to get about a hundred shots of both males and females when they were passing through. At least none stayed longer than two days. I still got one half of an orange up but nothing has eaten it and the feeder is still full.

Your photo is really nice and reminds me that I wonder why they never built a nest here? They might know more about our weather here than we do or have more common sense as this is the Miami Valley Drip place where everyone has nose problems of one kind or another.

Stacey Olson said...

Never mess with a woman when they are building their nests... lol great captures..

Tom said...

Never seen one of these to our friend Abe posted some drinking from oranges in his garden... this is a different view altogether with the nest building in progress

This Is My Blog - fishing guy said...

Salty: This is a bird that I've never seen in my area. I would like to see one. Nicely captured my friend.
Amazing how animals adapt to what's avaiable.