A topic to highlight some of the strange places critters have chosen to nest. @GothHobbit inspired this topic in weird names topic.
Below I photographed this Great-horned Owl nest years ago plunked down in a mature tree right where two major highways in a major city (Denver) intersect. I pulled off one of those highways to take a few photos of the nest and I could not believe how loud the traffic noise was. The truly strange thing is that the sign below is marking the exit for a nearby wildlife refuge. Which would be a much better place for the nest I would think.
Another example of a critter choosing a strange place to nest. This one is a Yellow-bellied Slider laying eggs under a children’s playground slide. Thankful it wasn’t at the slide landing area. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/141534944
[These ones]( https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/141523260 ) laid their egg overnight in a waiting area for a university campus entrance. With the arrival of the students in the morning they sadly abandoned their nest. [These ones]( https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/139132600 ), possibly the same pair, laid their eggs by the side of an internal road on the same campus. They successfully hatched their chicks, but I didn’t see them again and I don’t know if the local cats ate them. Another nest has been made in the same place this year, possibly by the same pair, and a friend is keeping an eye on them, though this there there is also building work going on there : (
You can see the busyness of the site by the location of the observation : (
I used to participate in a raptor nest survey for our local parks here in NE Ohio. I watched some red-shouldered hawks reuse a nest in a big sycamore tree for a few years. It was actually an old squirrel nest with a lot of leaves. But, the hawks took it over one spring. The hawks tore out all the leaves, added more branches and made it their home for a few years. It is possible that it was originally a hawk nest that the squirrels took over, which was then reclaimed. I have seen it go both ways with hawks and squirrels.
There was a big storm one year, and the thick branch that the hawk nest was on was torn off the tree. Fortunately, it was not during nesting season. I was sad. I knew the hawks would probably relocate nearby, but I never expected this. They built a nest UNDER a bridge on one of the supports which was right next to the sycamore tree.
You can see the nest has been built up over a couple of seasons. It never gets broken apart by the weather, so it will probably eventually be too tall to use. The hawks probably keep adding on just because their building/nesting instincts kick in in the spring.
Years ago I saw a couple of swallows flying into the open end of a traffic signal arm over a major intersection. When I used to work in Alaska’s arctic and regularly rode my bike along the trans-Alaska Pipeline access road, swallows (sorry, no pics and can’t remember which species) nested on the vertical support members just underneath the 48" diameter pipe, or sometimes in the tiny opening between the pipe and the thick layer of insulation where it joined the supports.
Thanks for the info. I’m not sure how this is relevant to a topic on iNaturalist though. I’m not on Reddit nor do I want to be. As is probably the case with others.
