Last week I mentioned that the next citizen science project sponsored by the Cornell Lab is “Nest Watch.”

I’m not participating but I am watching a nest. We leave the side garage door open so the cats and dog can come and go. Apparently, a male starling took advantage of the open door thinking this would be a good place to make a nest. We’ve named him Mozart because Mozart had a pet starling.

Cindy and I kept seeing a starling in the garage. The bird would fly around in a panic when we walked into the garage and usually end up trying to go through the glass of the window. I caught him more than once with my bare hands and took him to the door and released him. I figured it was trying to build a nest, and I looked all over the garage for signs of nest building, but no luck.

The males make nests in an attempt to attract females. It worked because now there is a nest in my garage. We’ve named the female Constanze after Mozart’s wife. Starlings are “tree-hole” nesting birds.

This means they prefer to make their nests in a hollow area of a tree or a nest box, not somewhere out in the open. A few years ago, I put a nest box up in an attempt to attract a kestrel to my yard, but alas, all I attracted were starlings.

Once again this past week the parent bird flew in a panic as I came into the garage. It was coming from the shelves above the freezer. I started an in-depth look. I had two old boxes of camping equipment on the top shelf. They were a little difficult to reach and get down, but I got the job done. No nests. On the next shelf down were two very heavy boxes of books. Paperbacks. I never throw a book away. I enjoy coming back a few years later and re-reading them.

While there were a number of mud dauber wasp nests among the books, there was no bird nest.

I decided it was time to clean off the shelves and get rid of some things. There was a box of wine corks.

I’m not sure why we were saving them. There was an old minnow trap and a large flowerpot. The pot was so tall there was only a small space between the top of the pot and the next shelf above it. I took down the pot and there in the bottom were four blue eggs nestled in a neat grass nest. I showed Cindy and then we had to make a decision…allow Mozart and Constanze to continue nesting in the garage, or throw it out. When it comes to animals I’m softhearted, and besides, we had already named the birds, so we left the eggs in the pot and put it back on the shelf.

Most people don’t like starlings; however, they are a beautiful bird with black, iridescent feathers and a bright yellow bill. In the winter they are speckled white. They grow new feathers in the fall and the tips of the feathers are white. Over winter they wear the tips of the feathers down in what is called “wear molt” and the white speckles disappear.

I wrote about starlings in the Leader five years ago and mentioned that all of them came from New York City in 1890 when Eugene Schieffelin imported 100 of them from England. Why? He was a Shakespeare fan, and Shakespeare wrote about a starling in the play “Henry IV Part I”. It is estimated that there are now over 200 million of them in the U.S. including a pair that have taken over my kestrel nest box and Mozart and Constanze who are living in the old flowerpot on the third shelf above the freezer in my garage.