We Think Of Birds,

being bird brained,

photograph Defender bird spikes, but some are starting to outsmart us, I guess we have all seen the above, spikes fitted to buildings and walls to stop birds from perching on them, but it appears all we have done is to give them nesting materials!

all photographs of birds nests courtesy of Denisea, a few years back, a Bristol tree was spotted with spines lining its branches, not what the designer intend!

and it looks like the birds are talking to each other and leaning, as researchers from Naturalis Biodiversity Centre and the Natural History Museum Rotterdam have discovered,

a paper published this month in Deinsea highlights several examples of magpies and carrion crows building nests with strips of anti-bird spikes in both Rotterdam and Antwerp,

and are even using the spikes to defend their own nests, magpies are particularly enterprising and use pointed edges for their original purpose: many have lined the roofs of their homes with the spikes to deter predators from snatching eggs, 

the birds even manage to remove the adhesive from the spikes as has been recorded after several sightings of cockatoos tearing the strips from buildings and is part of a long history of avians using human-made material like knitting needles and barbed wire for their nests, “It’s actually like a joke,” biologist Auke-Florian Hiemstra said about the findings. “Even for me as a nest researcher, these are the craziest bird nests I’ve ever seen.” bird brained? I think we may have to rethink that one!