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Magpies and crows are using “anti-bird spikes” to make nests (2023)
Birds often incorporate human-made materials while nest building, but a new study shows European corvids are taking the idea to the extreme.
The pointy wires you might see attached to roofs, ledges, and light poles are meant to deter urban species like pigeons from landing, pooping, and even nesting where people don’t want them to. “It feels very rebellious,” says Auke-Florian Hiemstra, lead study author and a biologist researching animal architecture at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, Netherlands. Two of the newly documented nests, collected by the researchers and brought back to the museum for preservation and display, still had sticky adhesive lingering on the hardware, implying that the animals tore the spikes off of buildings.
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