Monday, April 8, 2013

Crow’s Nest

crow nest

Have you ever seen a Crow’s Nest?  Not the lookout’s perch at the top of a ship’s mast – the actual home the bird builds?  The kindest thing you can say about it is that it is functional. 

It is certainly not a paragon of nest building aesthetics, so I got a good laugh a few days ago watching a Crow collecting material for its new home. 

The Crow was in the top of one of our oak trees, breaking off foot-long twigs.  It hopped from limb to limb breaking them off and dropping them on the ground.  Finally, it would get one it liked and would fly it over to the nest site in a big pine tree in our neighbor’s yard.  Then it would return and start the selection process all over again.

I thought it was hilarious that he/she was being so picky when the finished product was going to look so haphazard anyway.

It turned out that the joke was on me. 

An hour or so later, Honey saw the Crow making multiple trips from the ground below our oak tree to the nest in the pine, ferrying all the twigs it had broken off earlier.  The Crow wasn’t being picky – it was being efficient.

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