Snakeskin: It’s Fashionable, and It Scares Predators Away From Bird Nests
The New York Times
A museum curator with a ladder showed that birds that build cavity-style nests are able to protect their eggs with the skin shed by snakes.
In 1889, the naturalist Allan Octavian Hume wrote that he was puzzled by macabre decorations he observed in many birds’ nests: strips of dried snakeskin.
“Are birds superstitious, I wonder? Do they believe in charms?” he wrote in “The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds.” If not, why were so many birds using pieces of snakeskin to adorn their nests? Hume and several of his contemporaries had a hypothesis: The snakeskin scared away predators.
A new study suggests that they were onto something: After analyzing century-old records of birds’ nests and observing over 140 nests with and without snakeskin, researchers reported last month in The American Naturalist that in some types of nests, the presence of snakeskin greatly reduced the risk that predators would take the eggs.
All reptiles shed patches of dead skin as they grow, but snakes shed skins off their entire bodies in one big piece. However, finding a snakeskin in the wild can be tricky, said Vanya Rohwer, a curator at the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates and an author of the study. This scarcity of snakeskin makes it all the more remarkable that so many birds use it in their nests.
“How in the world are they finding it? And why do they invest all that time to bring it back to their nests?” Dr. Rohwer said.
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