And actually, like, it's a little bit sad, I think. And actually, when you walk through a city, suddenly, you see them everywhere.
I think it's magnificent to see these rebellious birds actually fighting back. Hiemstra, I'm moved to say, good for them. Which really reflects how animals now are adapting to our urban city life. But I think the - well, the parents may struggle a little bit to handle the material, but they managed to find a way. But within the nest, it's this very safe place made with soft material. So the whole outside of the nest is covered with these bird spikes. SIMON: Don't they have to worry about getting hurt using these - what I'll refer to as hazardous materials? And so they also solved the problem of having no spikes in the city centers. And so this is within the family of the corvids, and those are very smart birds, birds which are very intelligent, which are also using tools. We have examples of crows using them and examples of magpies using them. So a few species in particular use these spikes. Now, any birds more likely than others to use these spikes? HIEMSTRA: And I think that's just perfect. They use the bird spikes in the same way as they were intended to be used, namely to ward off other birds. However, in cities, there are not a lot of thorny branches, but there are a lot of anti-bird spikes. And for this roof, normally, they search for thorny branches to actually prevent predation from the nest, so to ward off predators. A nest bowl, but also have a roof over their nest. But they even use them in a very smart way as magpies do not only have a bowl. And actually, just making a nest out of anti-bird spikes is already hilarious. But, yeah, I think the magpie ripped them off the roof and used them in its own nest. But all the bird spikes closest to the nest, they were gone, and just a trail of glue was present. This nest was made in the courtyard of a hospital, and we also went to the roof of the hospital. SIMON: How do the birds wrestle them out of the material? HIEMSTRA: Fifteen hundred - so that's like a bunker for birds.
And we also describe it in the paper as the biggest nest we found, a nest that included more than 1,500 nasty, metal, anti-bird spikes. HIEMSTRA: The very first nest I saw was a nest from Antwerp, in Belgium. SIMON: Can you describe a few of these nests for us? Hiemstra, thanks so much for being with us. Auke-Florian Hiemstra, a biologist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, was the lead author of the paper and joins us now. These are strips of metal spikes that people attach to the eaves of buildings to try and deter birds from roosting there. Now a team from the Netherlands has documented a number of birds' nests around Europe that are built from anti-bird spikes. Urban birds have long used a wide assortment of building materials to build their nests - galvanized nails, barbed wire, even sheet music by BJ Leiderman, who writes our theme music. One human's trash just might be an avian's armoire.
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