Mash and Grind
Sheathbills from Palmer Station, Antarctica
And here are a pair of the sheathbills who were nesting at the time I drew that field note. This pair, seen perched against the blue wall of the Bio building, had built a mansion of a nest under the Mash and Grind. The Mash and Grind is a room-sized trash compactor used at Palmer to reduce waste- it’s where cardboard gets compacted, glass gets smashed, and every piece of trash that is not dangerous or likely to decompose gets packed away for eventual an eventual boatride to Chile for recycling.
Sheathbills build nests that are tucked away from the elements. In areas where they are living amongst another bird colony (they often live with penguins or cormorants), they will take over an abandoned petrel burrow or find a crack in the rocks and squeeze down in to build the nest itself, which is usually just a shallow collection of rocks and feathers at the very back of the burrow. And then they decorate! They come back to the same nest year after year, and continue to add to their collection of stuff surrounding the entranceway of the burrow.
A NOAA scientist told me that many times, the pairs seem to have a signature item that they like to collect. Sometimes it’s limpet shells, or rocks of a specific color, or, if they’re around humans, some easy-to-steal item. For the NOAA scientists at one of the field camps, it was a useful habit – when they needed to find lost radio transmitters, they would check around the sheathbill nests, and more often than not, they’d find one.
For these two, the Mash and Grind was essentially the Palace of
Versailles. They stole stickers off boxes (particularly red “Fragile”
stickers), bits of cardboard, anything small or shiny that somebody set
down for a second, along with the usual limpet shells, feathers and
pebbles. If you couldn’t find something small that you might have
carelessly left around the station, their nest bower wasn’t a bad place
to check first.They are unafraid of humans, so you had to be very careful when they were around- they were quite happy sneak up and steal a pen or a hair band, or to dismantle some large piece of equipment for a prize to take back to the nest.