"Oh, that I had wings like a dove! For then I would fly away and be at rest."

Psalms 55.6

The two mourning doves I saw sitting side by side on a light-line overlooking the bleak plains of Zamora undoubtedly had a secret. Somewhere they were going to build a flimsy stick nest in the upcoming springtime, but you wondered where in looking at the almost treeless terrain. Over the hill perhaps, they would find an isolated tree and compete with other birds to build their hope for the future. Or maybe they would fly westward toward the Berryessa woodlands to achieve their best-laid schemes. A bird has wings and can fly to its dreams!

How far would the doves fly to find a nesting site? Doves need a tree; it is written into the genes. Winters, CA, where I was going to visit, was 30 miles south of the Zamora hills, and like any town, the residents have planted a host of landscape trees suitable for the birds. Indeed, the little town is like an oasis in the sea of open farmland where birds cluster in the community to find food and housing in the variety of introduced trees planted there. Birds are not choosy about trees, and the doves would pick an exotic ornamental pear just as readily as a native oak. Trees also have dead twigs and broken branches easily utilized for nest-making material by not only the doves, but by a number of other stick-minded bird species.

Although small songbirds often use grasses and fluffy things–or even mud–to make nests, larger birds more commonly build an egg-holding platform of sticks. One of the super-stick users apparent in the isolated oaks along the west valley is the magpie. Their huge stick assemblage is massed into a bristly fortress like some large clump of mistletoe, very apparent in the winter-time leafless deciduous trees.

As I watched the flashy black and white magpies with their stunningly yellow bills scrounging the fields, I wondered if their oversized structures were partly for show in keeping with their flamboyant character. Even human housing zones feature some individuals that build prominent structures often as a showpiece. The creatures of nature usually operate out of a practical need.

Actually, all members of the Corvidae Family–jays, magpies, and crows–build stick nests. A pair of scrub jays built a stick nest in our plum tree one year, and I know crows collect a motley array of sticks for a nest. In my boyhood bird egg collecting days, I discovered a crow’s nest in a thorn tree. It was an impossible climb up a thorny trunk to reach that assemblage of sticks, but somehow I secured one of the green eggs with black scrawls and descended unscathed. That must have been the most hard-wrought prize in my collection, with the exception of the bank swallow pearl white egg I obtained by climbing a cliff side. There were no sticks in the swallow nest.

Although the tiny house wren is a prolific stick user in comparison to its size, the champion stick gatherers, though, must be the egrets and herons. Those long-legged wading birds ironically build large stick platforms high in trees to hold their pale blue eggs. I had a first hand look at their handiwork when I was employed with the Lake Merritt Wildlife Refuge. Part of my job was keeping a check on the egret colony nesting on the off-shore Duck Islands.

The egret phenomena of Lake Merritt provides a graphic example of how a managed, manmade habitat can attract animals. Build it and they will come. First, there was only soil retained by pilings and planks built in 1953, then vegetated with mostly exotic plants, such as the causarina beef-wood tree of Australia, eucalyptus, bottlebrush, willow, and thornless blackberry. By 1970, the trees had grown into mature growth attractive to the shy black crowned night herons and egrets even though the metropolitan maelstrom whirled around the perimeter of the lake.

At first, we noticed two pair of herons building their stick nests in the bottlebrush, and by 1972 the common egrets were constructing a few stick nests high in the causarina. Ten years later, as many as 100 nests were being recorded, and most improbable, the parent birds were commuting out to San Francisco Bay to keep the colony supplied with fish food. If you watched, you could see them return in a long glide down over Oakland, land at the nest, and regurgitate fish broth to their demanding brood. Only a privileged few caretakers had access to the islands, and you could be sprayed with regurgitated fish by the infants if you tarried too long under those branches.

The most comical thing to watch was the stick wars in the springtime. Such a need for a accumulation of sticks drove the market up, and furious battles raged when one egret would steal sticks from its neighbors. How intently those tall birds marched around the duck yard, cocking their eye on any suitable stick, and then sailing over the water with a stubborn piece of wood protruding from their long beaks. Even though the Duck Island trees are declining under heavy use, another stick demon–the cormorant–has pushed its feisty presence into the scene, displacing the more delicate egrets, and the occupation zone scene goes on where birds of different feathers are indeed gathered together.

Those egret and heron rookeries can also be found near Oroville at the Afterbay Outlet where the stick business is enacted in the top of cottonwood trees. It is a grand get-together where the normally solitary egrets travel from distant places to join the colony.

Many birds of prey, especially eagles, build large stick platforms to carry out their missions. An old red-tailed hawk stick nest was occupied by a great horned owl one year near the Afterbay since the owl is an early nester, a dual-use nest later used by the hawks. Houses of sticks do succeed if you’re a bird, even though "the Three Little Pigs" had difficulty with the permanence of a stick house! Under the facade of vinyl shingles and paint, most human habitations are built on a foundation of sawed stick-boards. The woody substance of trees helps hold the world of life together whether sticks or logs. Salute the trees, vital components of life on earth! - March 9, 2004