One advantage of being home-bound during this COVID-19 pandemic is spending more time watching the birds. I especially like the cardinals who flock to my feeder in a variety of plumage being male, female or juvenile. However, the finches are fun to see as well, particularly the yellow ones. The other day a blue jay came by to provide a bit of blue for the color mix.
While greatly appreciating birds, I failed to recognize their superior engineering skills until reading this New York Times article about avian nest construction. They report how researchers at University of Akron used a ‘smushing’ chamber to measure how bird-homes bounce back after being compressed.
“We hypothesize that a bird nest might effectively be a disordered stick bomb, with just enough stored energy to keep it rigid.”
Hunter King, experimental soft-matter physicist, University of Akron*
I now feel a lot smarter saying “smushing”, it being a scientific term used by world-class physicists. However, I’m more interested in the stick-bomb bit. This is explained best by Popular Mechanics in their report (stemming from the same scientific study by Hunter et al) on Why the Humble Bird Nest Is an Engineering Marvel.
As a fun project to while away the time indoors, build your own stick bombs using popsicle or jumbo sticks such as those available here.
The stick bomb illustrated in this video by Brain Coach Don offers a great deal of excitement, but I do not recommend it for building bird nests—ha ha. The difference is them making ones that are disordered and thus nonexplosive.
*(Mechanics of randomly packed filaments—The “bird nest” as meta-material, Journal of Applied Physics 127, 050902 (2020))