Latest news with #Hiemstra
CBC
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
This bird's nest is made of candy wrappers and face masks. Here's what we can learn
In the city centre of Amsterdam, a seemingly ordinary bird nest tells an extraordinary story of human impact on the environment. It's constructed from unexpected materials, including sunglasses, earphones, fireworks and even car parts. "It's a very special nest, because when we started collecting this nest, or should I say, excavating it, we reached nest layer after nest layer, and with every layer we went deeper in time," Auke-Florian Hiemstra told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal. "So it turns out this nest is kind of like a history book, and you could just flip through it going back in time to the start of the 90s." The Dutch doctoral student conducted a study published in February focusing on common coots, a type of water bird, and found that these birds have started using plastic as building material for their nests. In late 2021, Hiemstra came across a large coot nest in front of Allard Pierson Museum, the biggest archaeological museum in Amsterdam. Inside the nest, Hiemstra uncovered 635 artificial items, with the earliest layer containing a Mars bar wrapper emblazoned with a small FIFA World Cup logo from 1994, an event held in the U.S. "It's just wild to me, as the wrapper looks so fresh, so new, so the colour pops. You can read the text, yet you know by heart it's 30 years old," said Hiemstra. Among the other items found were foil from cigarette packages, a ticket to Amsterdam's National Maritime Museum and a number of fast food remnants from McDonald's. " For a while … it kind of felt like I'm a McDonald's archeologist, just studying wrappers and lids and sauce," he said. There was also a more somber discovery: around 15 face masks from the COVID-19 pandemic were buried deep in the nest. What does it tell us? This unusual collection of modern trash has given Hiemstra more than just a snapshot of the birds' nesting habits — it has allowed him to trace the environmental history of the area. By analyzing the expiry dates on the packaging, Hiemstra has created a "perfect timeline" of this particular nest site. "Like stratigraphical layers, geological layers on top of each other, being able to get this full picture of around 10 breeding attempts in the last 30 years," he said. "This nest tells the whole story of the whole history of this water bird in the city." It also reveals how the nesting behaviours of these birds have evolved in response to the abundance of plastic waste in urban environments. Traditionally, coots build their nests from plant material, which decays rapidly. But plastic waste, being durable and non-biodegradable, allows coots to reuse their nests season after season. "Reusing your nest kind of makes evolutionary sense so you can just reuse the base of the nest of last year, add a few new pieces so you have more time to defend your territory, to feed your young," he said. But Hiemstra questions whether the man-made materials are the best choice for the birds. He says while face masks in a coot's nest may provide a soft surface for laying eggs, the elastic bands can easily entangle the birds' feet, making the nest a potentially harmful place instead of a safe spot for their young. Hiemstra describes the nest as a physical manifestation of the Anthropocene, the era of human impact on the Earth. He says it illustrates how lasting human actions have been, from the rise of plastic pollution to the urbanization of wildlife habitats. "If it's a good thing or a bad thing, that is the big question of my research — is it an adaptation to city life or is it an ecological trap in which they think they can use [the trash] however they end up entangled and suffering?" Hiemstra said.
The Guardian
04-04-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
From burger wrappers to masks, bird nests tell story of throwaway culture
One day in 1996, someone ate a McDonald's McChicken burger in Amsterdam. Perhaps it was a quick bite after work? A leisurely stroll down the canals? A family outing? These details are lost to time, but others are hard to erase completely. This meal left a permanent mark on the local environment when a nesting coot found the discarded McChicken wrapper and decided to use it to line its nest, where it remained. 'It really shows that it's not just us humans who are writing history, but also these birds are taking notes, keeping a score and then documenting our throwaway society,' said the nest biologist Auke-Florian Hiemstra, who has been researching the influence of the Anthropocene era on birds' nests in Amsterdam's canals. Hiemstra is a researcher who works on animal architecture and specialises in builds made with artificial material. When investigating nests in canals, he found a variety of old packaging discarded from the early 1990s up to last year. The Eurasian coot only started to migrate to Amsterdam in the late 1980s and Hiemstra's findings of packaging from 1994 could show the entire life span and heritage of the species' existence in the area. Hiemstra identifies the year the packaging originates from using best before dates or researching what era the logo designs were used in. Some of the nests have packaging from more recent foods, which gives researchers a more accurate date of when the nest would have been built. 'One nest had a package of fresh milk, and so we knew that the expiry date could not be that far from the day that it was consumed,' he said. Some relics found in the nests include Mars packaging advertising the 1994 World Cup, while a more recent nest was made with a layer of face masks, a lasting impact of the waste from the Covid-19 pandemic. While a bird's nest is usually made from twigs and moss, the abundance of plastics has been helpful for birds in the city where natural items are in short supply. Hiemstra said there would probably be a return of natural nests if people focused on regreening cities and bringing natural water vegetation back, but in the meantime the birds are successfully working with what they have. 'We had this very polluted swan nest in Amsterdam, and everyone was talking about it saying 'such a shame' and 'what a horrible nest',' he said. 'However, the swan was very happy with the nest and it had five chicks, and they all made it to adults. For the swan it was a very successful nest. In a way the same goes for the coots. 'Our litter for them is not a waste product but something very valuable. I really hope we can learn something from these animals to re-evaluate how we think about our materials. These plastics are a wonderful material yet we use them for single use and throw them away.' Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion 'It's really frustrated me, the term 'throwaway society'. The 'away' is not a specific place, 'away' is still here,' Hiemstra said. 'Around 80% of all the plastics that [have ever been] produced are still on the planet right now somewhere.' Plastic can take anywhere from 20 to 500 years to decompose and according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development only 9% of plastic is actually recycled. Hiemstra said we were more aware of the dangers of single-use plastic, but the research showed damning evidence of damage that had already been done. 'We all know that plastic does not fall apart – in the 50s it was praised that this material does not fall apart. Now, we are a little bit afraid because it does not fall apart. Our thinking about plastics has really changed. 'We know that it doesn't fall apart but finding these materials that have been littered 30 years ago, yet they look as fresh as they were just littered yesterday; that really gave me the chills. This material is really here to stay.'
Yahoo
11-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Coots are recycling our rubbish to make longer-lasting plastic nests
Mars bar wrappers, McDonald's packaging, face masks and much more plastic waste is being reused by some water-dwelling birds to nest in the middle of big cities, researchers have found. Some of these nests are even used for decades, as can be seen from the old plastic packaging, according to a new study on coot nests, published in the journal Ecology. In autumn 2021, a team led by Auke-Florian Hiemstra from Leiden University in the Netherlands collected nests of coots (Fulica atra) in the centre of Amsterdam. When they disassembled the nests, which consisted largely of plastic, the researchers came across layer upon layer of increasingly old plastic debris. The most-used nest was found in a canal under a mooring point in a hollow metal pipe that just reached the surface of the water – curiously, opposite the University of Amsterdam's archaeological museum. The team found 635 pieces of plastic debris in it. More than 200 of these came from food packaging, 32 of which still had a legible date that allowed the plastic to be dated. The oldest plastic pieces dated back to the 1990s: One Mars bar referred to the 1994 World Cup in the United States, while some of the many McDonald's wrappers were from 1996. The upper parts of the nest, on the other hand, were lined with 14 Covid masks, so they were from 2020 at the earliest. "The nest tells the entire story of these birds in Amsterdam," says Hiemstra, a nest researcher who also posts on his latest findings to birdwatchers and nature lovers on social media. In normal conditions, coot nests are typically rebuilt each breeding season from reed and other water plants that degrade quickly. However when the animals first entered the city centre of Amsterdam in 1989, such materials were scarce, according to the study. Photos suggest that the nest opposite the archaeological museum has been used for breeding about 10 times in the past 30 years – thanks to plastic waste. This, the team writes, saves the birds the laborious task of building a nest every year. Incidentally, the only other bird species to nest in the centre of Amsterdam, apart from the coot, is the great crested grebe (Podiceps cristatus), according to the study. It too can build its nest with plastic.
