Two summers ago, a patient looking out his Belgian-hospital window spied in a tree an odd, abandoned magpie nest of plastic and wire. He had, by coincidence, just read a newspaper article about a ...

Naturalist Auke-Florian Hiemstra has seen a lot of bird nests, but none were quite like the one he spotted in a photograph from a patient in a Belgian hospital. This nest, high in a sugar maple in the ...

Picture a bird’s nest. Chances are, what comes to mind is a woven basket of twigs and plant fibers—you might not imagine a crown of metal spines. But that’s exactly how some crows and magpies in ...