Seeing Nests in Winter

     I see many nests in bare deciduous trees and shrubs in winter in southeastern Pennsylvania.  Those nests were built by a variety of creatures to serve as homes and nurseries.  And those structures show what animals are living in an area and how abundant they might be.
     The leafy, ball homes of the abundant gray squirrels are often the most commonly seen of structures in tree tops.  It seems that where gray squirrels can't find tree cavities to live in, particularly in older suburban areas with their many tall trees, but few hollows because they have been pruned out, they build homes of leaves that look like a bushel-basket-sized balls of dead foliage in the deciduous tree tops.  Each squirrel curls up in its leafy house each night and I am sure is warm and comfortable in the layers of its own fur and the compacted dead leaves that block the wind and retain its body heat.
     Many bird nests can be spotted in winter when trees and shrubs are bare.  Some of the more notable are the large, stick platforms of American crows, great blue and black-crowned night herons, red-tailed hawks, bald eagles and great horned owls in the tree tops of woods, suburbs and fields.  Crows and herons generally make their nurseries themselves, but hawks, eagles and owls usurp those cradles as early as January each year, displacing the original feathered contractors.
     A few notable small bird nurseries are those of American robins, American goldfinches, gray catbirds, northern cardinals and Baltimore orioles.  Robin nests are common in younger trees in the suburbs and quite familiar.  Dainty goldfinch nurseries, built of thistle fluff, fine grasses and spider webs, are works of art on sapling trees and in bushes in suburbs and fields near patches of thistle plants.  They get fluff for their cradles from the thistles and thistle seeds to feed their youngsters in the middle of summer.         
     Catbirds and cardinals build their nurseries deep in nearly impenetrable thickets of bushes and vines in hedgerows, woodland edges and suburban areas.  Their cradles are made of twigs and lined with soft grasses.
     But the most beautiful and intricate of birds' nests are those of Baltimore orioles.  Each one is a deep pouch of woven vines, rootlets and grasses suspended securely from a twig on the edge of a tree in a meadow, field or lawn and swinging gracefully in the wind.  Some oriole nests are suspended over water or roads.
     And the miraculous, paper nests of bald-faced hornets are attractive suspended on an outer twig of a deciduous tree on the edge of a woods or a lawn.  Hornets make those football-sized nests by scraping dead wood off trees or fences with their sharp jaws, mixing that wood with their saliva and adding the mixture to the developing hornet home.  During heavy frosts in fall, however, the queen hornet leaves her paper home and buries into the soil to spend the winter safe from cold.  All the worker hornets and drones of the year die.  The next spring, however, the surviving queens start new paper houses, the construction of which is continued by each one's increasing number of offspring through the summer.
     This winter, and succeeding ones, look for a variety of nests in deciduous trees and shrubbery.  They are as beautiful and interesting as the creatures that built them.