27 Bird Nests
About this episode
A bird nest can be practical, delicate and astonishing all at once. Artist Zora Verona shares the architecture of bird nests, what they reveal about birds and how to set up a birdbath at home.
Episode illustration: Golden Cisticola
Zora Verona is an emerging and interdisciplinary artist who explores the complexity of bird’s nests through sculpture. Her work intersects visual art, environmental philosophy, avian science and natural history. What drives Zora Verona to document, create and communicate is her legacy as well as the trajectory of loss of habitat, ecosystems and species. Her art awakens people’s understanding that every bird species is worthy of our wonder, awe and our protection.
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Kirsty: This episode was recorded on the country of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I would like to pay my respect to Elders past and present. Art has been used by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for thousands of years to share culture, language, knowledge and stories about birds.
Kirsty: Welcome to Weekend Birder - I'm Kirsty Costa. In the last episode of this podcast, we met artist and author Bridget Farmer. In this episode, we are going to hear from artist Zora Verona, who is going to help us improve our understanding of bird nests. Here is how Zora Verona became fascinated with the birds around her.
Zora Verona: I've always loved birds. What's not to love about birds? Definitely my journey in making nest sculptures started in response to the bushfires - not the bushfires in 2020, but actually in 2009. That's where it had its origin. I'm a resident of the Yarra Valley and I was there during that time. In 2020, when the fires returned and the smoke and the skies turned orange, it was a very distressing time for me and I was very aware of the wildlife being lost. I really wanted to do something to to find some solace within myself. I'd always wanted to have a creative practice. As I looked out the window, there were some beautiful little fairy wrens dancing on the lawn and the Eastern Spinebills were feeding from the salvia flowers by the kitchen window. I could even hear my resident lyrebird calling in the distance. And it was sort of like an epiphany. I thought, "Well, I could make nest sculptures and I could tell the stories of these birds, the birds that were being lost and the birds that are in our gardens". I know that from living in the city prior to living in the country, it was really rare to come across the bird's nest birds nests, our little treasures that sometimes fall in the wind, but we so often don't see them. In creating them, I thought, "Well, I could bring them to people. I could create an opportunity for people to engage with these hidden objects of nature. And so people would become more aware of birds and how amazing they are". My artist name is Zora Verona (my name is Lori Kravos). In choosing the name Zora Verona, it was to honour my two grandmothers. Zora is my grandmother on my father's side, Verona on my mother's side. 'Zora' in Slovenian has a beautiful meaning - it means the light at dawn. 'Verona' means truth. So I thought, "What greater truth can there be than birdsong? The light of dawn".
Kirsty: Zora Verona creates spectacular woven sculptures of bird nests from around the world. As part of her research, she has learnt that birds build their nests with their beaks and with their breast.
Zora Verona: The breast is something that they push against every single fibre until it's absolutely pliant and they turn round and around. But of course their feet would also be stamping down the material. There's a beautiful story that I read about a bird called a cisticola and they're actually a stitching bird. They, as well as tailorbirds, stitch with their beaks but they use their feet to pull the leaves together. They create a hidden chamber within living leaves. They put very fine holes within the leaves and they push something like spider web or plant down through the holes so that those leaves can be stitched without browning or changing colour. They then hide their nest within (for want of a better term) a coat. They make a coat of leaves in which to hide the body, which is their nest. It was a great little piece of literature that I read about the female pulling the leaves around her with her feet for fit. And then, just like we would do in our own sewing projects if we don't have quite enough fabric, she would add another panel (or in her case, a leaf). And so she would draw another leaf around her. If it would fit her body, then she would begin to sew and the male bird would actually bring her the material. She would hang on to the leaves and she would do the sewing as he went and got the threads for her. I find it really amazing and remarkable how they build such intricate structures using just their beak and their breast. I struggle to do what they do using my hands! I have a couple of different needles at home and I call those my 'bird beaks'. I love to reflect on the fact that our earliest needles were actually made of bones and the very oldest needle that they found in an archaeological dig in a Siberian cave was 50,000 years old. They think that this needle was made from the bone of a bird. So once again, I think we take our inspiration from the birds in the techniques that we lay claim to in art and craft. There's two different types of felt. One is wet felting and the other one is needle felting. The bird will simulate what we call wet felting. It's just an overlying of natural fibers. What causes fibers to belt together is friction, heat and moisture. The bird can achieve all of that using its own body. It presses its breast repeatedly going in a circular motion, and it lays down the fibers (very small strands) one at a time and that creates felt. For needle felting, the needles that we use for that both in our home craft or in a much larger sort of manufacturing process, those needles have ridges on them. If you look at fine detailed drawings of a bird's beak, they have ridges or they have bristles, which would create the same action. Needle felting is essentially fibers that are stabbed over and over again with that rigid needle to lock the fibers together. That is exactly what the birds are doing with their beak. So, yeah, I just find them extraordinary! The correlations - the more I learned about birds and how they made their nest, the more I realized how much correlation there is between our art and craft practices and the birds. Birds are the most incredible creatures. I don't know whether we always give them the credit that they deserve. We have these expressions like "bird brain", but yet there are so many art and craft traditions that we lay claim to that really could have been inspired by birds. Birds are our closest living relative to dinosaurs. They've been around a lot longer than us homosapiens. Yet there are so many examples of birds that have been in existence, like the weaver birds, for two million years. They've been weaving for two million years. That's when homohabilis was walking the paleo savannah. I think that in creating nest sculptures, I'm able to tell these stories and to show people a hidden world because they wouldn't come across nest necessarily in the wild. But many of us don't have the opportunity to travel to the savanna of Africa and learn about these incredible birds. It fascinates me how there might be an example of a bird who weaves in Australia but there's also examples of birds that we've in Africa, or some birds may use snakeskin in their nest. That's not just Australian birds, that's birds in North America that don't come in contact with each other but yet they use it for the same reason. I think the subject of birds and how they make their nests is never ending. There's always something to discover in creating the sculptures and telling those stories. You know, it's an offering to people to to take a glimpse into a world that they might not have known even existed.
Kirsty: Wow! I've never really thought about bird nests in that way. I'm fascinated by this shape and structure, but I must confess that I've never really taken the time to think about how they've been created. Zora Verona says that it's also really interesting to think about why different types of nests are built by different types of birds.
Zora Verona: Birds build their nest essentially for the next generation, but it actually starts first with wooing a mate. I love the story of some of the weaver birds and how they would have to build a number of nests before they were accepted by their mate. These male birds might be wooing up to five females at a time, and they might have to build three nests per female. Each bird might actually have to build fifteen nests before they're chosen. The building of the nest actually starts with showing a level of fitness and a level of skill. If you are a great artisan, then you will get a date and then you will be able to go forth. Sometimes, like in the case of the bowerbird (which I'm sure many people know), that's actually not a nest that is a performance stage for the male bird to woo his mate. After he's wooed his mate, the female goes on then to make the nest. The nest is a place to incubate the eggs or to keep the eggs warm until what point in time that they hatch. It's also to keep those eggs safe from predators. Eggs are especially delicious to all sorts of mammals and snakes and other birds. They're also a form of protection for those little eggs and also for the nestlings once they hatch before they fledge and leave the nest.
Kirsty: I think they will need to be a Weekend Birder episode just on bowerbirds. There are eight different types of bowerbirds found in Australia, and the species that lives in Zora Verona's area is the Satin Bowerbird. These bowerbirds live along most of the eastern and southern coast. They are famous for decorating their bowers with blue objects like parrot feathers, butterfly wings, seeds and fruits. Sometimes they also like to add greenish yellow objects as well. What concerns Zora Verona is how much human waste can also be found in bowers and also in birds nests.
Zora Verona: I found it quite concerning to see a prevalence of plastic coming into the nest and there was a great article in The Conversation of some researchers that studied nests within Australia and the really high concentration of plastic that started to occur over time. And we wonder why are birds choosing that material? And a lot of it has to do with availability. If you're looking for long strands of grass to build your nest and suddenly there's fishing line, then they would utilise that material because it looks like long fibers, it's very strong. So of course they'd be attracted to it as well. But the unfortunate thing about the use of plastics is that they have very low insulation qualities. So many of the natural fibers that birds would have used in the past are far more insulating. They also don't have any sort of antimicrobial qualities. If you were using eucalypt leaves, that would actually provide some sort of protection to the nestlings. If you're using plastic that has no protection or in the case of, say, snakeskin, there's some research that's been done at universities over in the US that have shown that if nesting boxes had snakeskin even draped at the entrance or as part of the nest, they wouldn't suffer predation. Birds now are picking up cellophane and incorporating cellophane in their nest, and I have to wonder whether they're doing that because they can't find snakeskin. As much as birds are in decline, so are reptiles. And I don't think that cellophane from our sandwich is providing any protection deterring other predators from the nest. But there's real entanglement issues as well. So anyone who's ever been fishing, you'll recognise just how strong those fibers are. They will not break. Whether they be the adult bird itself, but especially those little nestlings, they can get wrapped, whether it be one foot or around their neck and they can strangle. So plastics are really dangerous and just a real wake up call for us when we start seeing entire nests made out of plastic. No other material. One of the nests I created for a recent exhibition was based on a magpie nest collected in Canberra next to a construction site. And that magpie nest was remarkable, but really quite a wake up call. It was made out of earbud pods, coat hangers, zip ties, electrical cord, everything that you would find tossed aside on a building site that Magpie had worked into his nest. I like to call him the 'enfant terrible' of the bird world and enfant terrible in the art world is someone like Damien Hirst. And what they're trying to do through their art is provide us with a really strong message. And I think that magpie was trying too. A really strong message that we need to leave habitat behind, not plastic, so they actually have something other than our trash to build their nest with.
Kirsty: I think that Zora Verona would love to spend her whole life traveling the world to see birds nests in their natural habitats. Instead, she has used natural history collections to do her research in order to create her nest artworks.
Zora Verona: I adore natural history collections. For those that live in Australia, in Melbourne, probably have had a museum visit to Museum Victoria. There's museums like Museum Victoria all over the world and they hold a very rich collection of both wildlife and objects like bird's nests. So I reached out to ornithologists curators who worked in preserving these amazing artifacts. Nests are time capsules. They tell us so much not only about the bird itself, but the time in which it was made. I felt very fortunate to connect with a number of curators around the world that had very rich and diverse nest specimen collections and worked from images. I really benefited from the fact that a lot of natural history collections are being digitized, so their photos and collection notes were more readily available. But yeah, so mainly I worked from photographs and from notes, but I was very fortunate to visit CSIRO (the Australian National Wildlife Collection in Canberra) and the curator there, Dr. Tanya Hof, was extraordinarily generous with her time. She Led me through her collections to to view some of those nest specimens in person, which was just an amazing experience to see those nests that could be 50 years old but they were still luminescent. They just absolutely glowed. Box tops came off. They were really, really, really beautiful. As I learned more about the techniques with which birds make their nests and the techniques that I would need to use to recreate them. I just started to see all these synergies between felting stitching, weaving and also all the precursors of what we call modern day textiles. So before we had Rayon, we would use bark and we would use wool and we would use feathers and birds did as well. And some of the similarities between why they use them and why we use them was really startling. So those were the examples I was looking for and I thought it would be great to also showcase Australian birds, but also up against examples from around the world so people could see that birds weave, felt and stitch right across the world and those would be different species of birds that would be specific to those regions.
Kirsty: If you look up, down and all around you, you will find lots of different types of bird nests. We heard last episode that white wing chiefs make mud nests. Birds like Spotted Pardalotes use burrows in the ground, robins, fantails and flycatchers delicately craft their nests by weaving leaves, moss and bark. Birds of prey, like Wedge-tailed Eagles and White-bellied Sea Eagles make nests from very large sticks that are added to each year. Nests can also be rushed and scrappy, like that of the Tawny Frogmouth. And some birds don't even bother building nests and they just lay their eggs on the ground like Masked Lapwings, Bush Stone Curlews, emus and Black-fronted Dotterles. Zora Verona says that one of the most fascinating nests that she's created is the Cape Penduline Tit, which is a small African bird.
Zora Verona: They're needle felters, so they make this really beautiful felted pouch and they essentially just stab the fibres over and over again until they make this stunning felted pouch that swings in the winds like a pendulum. But what I didn't realize is that particular species of bird also is a master of deception. So it's not just a master filter. He's a master of deception. He actually builds a false opening at the front of the nest, which a predator might approach and enter. And what they will find is a false chamber. So it's an empty chamber. And then on top of that very visible opening, he actually make like a little trap door and that trapdoor would close. So he would fly up to it and he would pried open with his beak and feet and then he would slide down the back behind the false chamber. And that's where the real nest would be. That just blew me away. I thought, "How is it that a bird has learned the art of deception? That was incredible!"
Kirsty: I'll share a photo of this amazing nest on Weekend Birder social media, which you can find by searching for birderpod. Zora Verona says that the Australian nest that most captures her interest is both one that is really old and also an important reminder of Australia's history.
Zora Verona: I think the Australian bird's nest that captured my interest was one that actually belongs in the Natural History collection over in London. And the reason being is that nest specimen was from 1838 and it was collected by John Gould. The fact that that nest specimen is still viewable today, it's still intact, that people always ask me, "Well, how long does a nest last?". And so I thought that was an excellent example of how long a nest would last. But also that idea that if you read about John Gould's expedition, he went home with thousands of birds and thousands of nests, and I sort of refer to them as the last nest of Australia. They sent so many collectors during that time, that craze of the 1800s when everyone was falling in love with the natural world, but they almost loved it to death. By taking eggs and nests and birds back to their home countries, whether that be London or Germany... Yes, they were creating a record of what existed, but they almost forced a lot of things out of existence. And it made me ponder how many lost nests there are and lost birds around the world. That would be a dream of mine to do, like a most digital appropriation or an artistic appropriation to to travel overseas and to bring these lost nests home. I know I couldn't bring the originals back home, but they very rarely see the light of day, these incredible specimens. And so to be able to photograph, tell their stories, and then recreate them as sculptures and exhibit them for the Australian public, that would be a dream. So yeah, I think that's the one that really stood out for me for very different reasons.
Kirsty: The nest that Zora Verona is talking about is the yellow throated honeyeater, and it was taken from Palau, a country in Tasmania. Thankfully it is now illegal to collect nests.
Zora Verona: The reason that came into being I alluded to before is there was this natural history craze that happened throughout the 1800s and early 1900s. So people were collecting from children to professionals, head hunters really in a way, they were collecting nest eggs and birds. So it was actually pretty much outlawed around the world to collect nests, but also as well to we have to be so mindful. So if you see a nest in the wild, we have to be very careful not to go back to that nest or approach it too closely. Number one, we could startle the bird that's trying to create our home, but we also are alerting predators so there's many predators to larger birds. For small birds in particular, they're watching us. And if we should take the same path to a nest each time, we are actually alerting those predators to the fact that lunch is being served in that tree over there. So that was a real motivation for me to create and to exhibit so people could connect with them safely without harming the birds.
Kirsty: One way that Zora Verona shows her support for birds in her local area is by establishing a series of bird baths in her garden.
Zora Verona: It was fascinating to me. I'd been given a birdbath as a gift, and as soon as I put it out, the minute I put it out, birds started landing and splashing and frolicking and having the most fabulous time. And it was great in attracting them to my garden because then I also got to watch their behaviours when they were collecting materials for their nests, which is also informed my sculptures. So I thought, "I'm going to get a second bird bath and I'm going to put it outside the kitchen window". And no one came. No birds visited. And when I spoke to the person who gifted me the first bath, they let me in on a little secret. They said that they had seasoned my bird bath before they had given it to me. And so this wise woman, she lays eucalypt leaves all on the bird baths, and then she wets them and she leaves that pulpy mask there for some time and it removes the smell of clay or manufacturing or us humans. And the minute the bird bath was seasoned, flocks and flocks of birds started to visit. I highly recommend anyone who enjoys bird watching. The birds will come to you if you put a bird bath in your garden season it, make sure you put it up high enough so predators can't reach it. And also a little bit of cover as well too. They quite enjoy it if it's nestled into some shrubs, they like a little privacy while they're taking their bath (just like we do).
Kirsty: Mental note... season my birdbath with gumleaves. Love it! I really admire the way that Zora Verona combines art, science and conservation to help us all tune into the wonder and joy of birds. And I also really value the role that art has to play in highlighting the need for bird conservation. If you would like to see some of Zora Verona's awesome artwork, check out the links in the episode notes. And if you would like to suggest a Weekend Birder topic, complete the form at weekendbirder.com and I'll do my absolute best to find a guest for an upcoming episode.
