Make your own bird nest, the perfect spring activity!

Spring has finally sprung! The birds are singing and using all their energy to build their nests, it seems like everywhere I turn I see a little bird with nesting material in its beak so what better way to honour the beginning of spring than to create your own bird nest! My daughter is an avid bird lover so this is something she loved the idea of from the start. It is also bird nesting week in Exploring Nature with Children so this little project has fit in perfectly. We also read a couple of books; An Egg is Quiet and A Nest is Noisy both by Dianna Hutts Aston. We have a few of her other books and we love them, such beautiful illustrations and just the perfect amount of facts.

We had planned to build our nest at the beach and I had the idea of using some willow branches as the base since it is so easy to work with but when we got there we realised we hadn't grabbed enough willow branches and not thin enough ones so had to continue once we got home. Nixie and Forrest had fun collecting bits and pieces to add to our nest on our walk. weaving the base was more fiddly than I though it would be but fairly easy, I just started with the thinnest pieces and weaved them into a circle until it reached the size I wanted it to be and at times using florist wire to strengthen it and to hold it into shape. Once the base was finished Nixie and Forrest continued to decorate it by adding feathers, catkins, weaving more leaves into it and whatever else they had collected.

 The next day we finished it up by painting some eggs that could go inside our nest. I had ordered some wooden ones and they were perfect and so easy to paint as well. We just used acrylic paint and as long as we painted very thin layers it dried up almost instantly, we painted a base colour first and let that dry until adding the speckles and spots. Nixie had wanted to paint blue jay eggs but as you can see they turned into something else.