We live in the country & have a few cows & horses. We also grow our own hay & bale it. To keep our pasture clean of nasty weeds like Thistles we’ll walk around the field & dig them up. While walking around we’ll occasionally see a bird nest, especially that of a Dickcissel.
They have pretty blue eggs. Sometimes we’ll see a little white egg speckled w/ brown spots, like the one in the photo. That’s a Cowbird egg.
This is a male Cowbird. The females don’t have the dominate brown head.
They’re name is perfect for them because you’ll see them hanging around the cattle, sometimes even sitting on the back of a cow or walking on the ground around the cattle’s feet waiting for bugs to pop up out of the grass. They travel a lot doing this & appear to not stay in one place long enough to build a nest, so they take advantage of the Dickcissel’s nest, letting them raise their babies.
Another bird we found near the barn was a Baltimore Oriole. They’re a beautiful orange & black bird & have a very pretty song.
They build a very unique nest. It looks like a bag hanging in the tree.
We noticed the same pair kept coming back & liked building their nest out of horse hair. We had a pony w/ white tail hair, so combed her tail & put that hair near the tree they’ve built the past nest. It was great! They built their nest out of her hair, a white nest! We watched the whole process, building the nest & raising their babies there.
Another bird that has a strange nest is the Mourning Dove.
Many time they build a very flat nest & can vary to where they build it too. It might be in the bend of a gutter or in a very dense tree branch.
I have found them on a branch of a Pine Tree & the nest was so flat I was amazed the eggs stayed there, plus after they hatched the babies didn’t fall off. I have found though Doves building a sturdier nest where more time was spent constructing it.
Killdeers are strange. We found their eggs laid directly on our gravel drive. When we did get near the eggs the female would run off acting wounded w/ maybe a broken wing, trying to sidetrack our attention to her.
Their eggs usually blend in w/ the gravel making them hard to see. It’s still amazing their eggs & babies make it. They could be run over by a car or eaten by snakes or other animals.
No matter what kind of nest many birds make or use for the babies, flat ones, bags, laying eggs on rocks, or maybe in another birds nest, they still persevere.