#birds #nest
The Colorado Plateau of Western North America is a red rock wonderland of strange formations and canyons carved down into its sandstone. These innumerable labyrinths are often watery retreats from the exposed rocky desert at the top of the plateau. It is here the canyon wren lives and nests. In larger crevices it builds a tiny cup nest to hold its own eggs, safely wedged somewhere high on a cliff face where nearly no predators can reach. Wrens, or more correctly the family troglodytidae are distributed quite widely, in both the Old and New Worlds, most diverse in the Tropical Americas. Wrens are some of the sweetest looking and singing birds in the world, but despite this they do some very bold and devious things to make sure nothing messes with their nests. The house wren has a dark side, participating in what is essentially sabotage to remove competition, filling the cup nests of other birds with sticks to make them unusable and even destroying eggs inside nests they find inside their territory.
In the dry forests of Costa Rica’s northwestern Pacific Coast lives a wren who have a particularly nasty way to keep predators away. The Rufousbacked Wren builds its nest in a acacia filled with stinging pseudomyrmex ants. Far north of these tropical dry forests in the Sonoran desert of Arizona the Cactus Wren builds nests among the spines of Saguaro (also home to gila woodpeckers and elf owls) and cholla cactus, making surge its young are safe.

Sources
Jones, Stephanie L. and Joseph Scott Dieni. (1995). Canyon Wren (Catherpes mexicanus), version 2.0. In The Birds of North America (P. G. Rodewald, editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York, USA.
Renkl, Margaret (July 2016). "Red in Beak and Claw". The New York Times.
"Gila Woodpecker". Nature Conservancy. Retrieved 20111028. Although they do not use them immediately, waiting first for the sap to harden, Gila Woodpeckers excavate cavities in cacti and trees as nesting sites.


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This is Backyard Expeditions. Here you can find wildlife footage and short documentaries on the natural world. Nature is full of surprises, often amazing things are happening just feet from you door. I am a biology student who was inspired by the likes of the BBC natural history unit, PBS, and animal planet as a Child. I have also long been a hobbyist photographer, filming interesting things over time. My goal is to document interesting behavior and highlight interesting species I encounter both in exotic locations, and on backyard expeditions.



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