Living inside my house we have four people (and a fifth who still lives here occasionally), a dog, and assorted spiders that my daughter is always aghast to find lurking unexpectedly in some corner.

Outside in addition to the expected flying and crawling insects, and worms, we have a squirrel who proudly serves as our dog’s arch-nemesis, baiting her and chittering at her whenever given the opportunity, at least one patchy brown opossum who plays dead quite convincingly, tree rats in the palm trees towering nearby, hummingbirds — and a nest of mourning doves that lives in our cactus. That’s right, in our cactus.

That’s them right in the center. There are two parents and two recently hatched chicks in the nest. Just two weeks later, the chicks are almost as large as the parents. This nest is eye-level with me, which might beg the question, what bird would build a nest here? Isn’t it easy prey for predators — like raccoons, which we also might have, or neighborhood cats? But note two things:  Look how well the birds and their nest blend in with the bark of the cactus; color-blind animals will have a challenge seeing them there. (So did I, at first.) Note also the severe challenge to entry:  Yes, there’s a wall behind the tree, but the entire nest is surrounded by a thicket of cactus needles no animal wants to brave.

Here’s another shot, below. From this angle, you can see how the birds get in:  There’s one clear angle of approach for flying in. But in the photo above you can see that any other way in is fraught with danger for would-be marauders.

It’s absolutely ingenious.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 at 10:37 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.