Mother nature's engineering!

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For most of the morning today, I watched our female Cardinal make trip after trip into our Yellow Rose Bush.
She was building a nest and it was awesome to see the building materials that she had found and how she wove
it all into a home. She found string, plastic strips, twigs, long fibrous leaves, and scraps of anything that could be
woven into her creation. It was amazing to see her flying with a long piece of twine, twice the length of her body
and land in the rose bush. The twine would hang out the side of the bush and would disappear an inch at a time,
being drawn up into the nest as she carefully wove it into her creation. The coolest part of her project is that the
plastic, string and other man-made materials formed the basic structure of the nest and all of the materials that
formed the inner structure where the egg would be laid were all plant materials and soft leaf strips. Amazing!
Here is a photo of her finished project. Note that you cannot see any of the man-made materials and that the
inner structure is a perfect inverted dome:

I have seen some amazing things happen in my backyard, but this piece of engineering today was absolutely awesome!
The Cardinal couple has been visiting our bird feeders for nearly 4 years and are like “wild pets”. It is incredible that they chose our largest rose bush to grow a new Cardinal.. :-))))

• 16 May, 2011
• 5 likes

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