Monthly Archives: March 2015

Find the nest 2

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This well-hidden nest took us a long time to find, even after we knew approximately where it should be. While we were searching, a man came to set up for a bike race and moved a port-o-potty right into the area where we thought the nest was, despite my protests. We worried that the parents of the nest would be too disturbed by the looming port-o-potty and the crowd of cyclists to feed the chicks, but fortunately that was not the case: the chicks grew up and fledged successfully.

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Find the nest

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Juncos nest on the ground, which might seem dangerous: ground nests are more accessible to predators than nests in trees. However, a nest in a tree is certain to be, well, somewhere in a tree; a nest on the ground could be anywhere. The ground of a forest or meadow or even a campground is a complex surface, with lots and lots of places where a junco nest could be, only a very tiny fraction of which actually contain a junco nest.

In this series of “Find the nest” posts, I’m going to try to share with you the challenge of looking at a habitat and guessing where a junco nest might be, and the excitement of finding a well-hidden nest. Each post will have a slide show of photos, beginning with a zoomed-out image of a fairly large area, and progressively zooming in to eventually reveal the junco nest. All of the photos are from my field work and are of real wild junco nests.

Use the back and forward arrows and the pause button to navigate the slide show.

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