Finished Product

This is the finished nest of the Bullocks Oriole. It’s been quite fascinating to watch the progress of the nest building at the Elkton Community Education Center.  You can see an earlier photo of the nest I posted on the blog a few days back on the 11^th. We first spotted the nest on the 8^th of May, and I’m sure there was a day or two of work already put in, so maybe it’s taken a week, or 7 days, to build the nest. As I mentioned before, the female does the nest building, but don’t assume the male does nothing, because as we have observed, he does preform an important function, that of guarding the nest site.  As the nest construction was underway there was a lot of territorial dispute going on with a pair of Western Kingbirds who had also started a nest in the same tree.  The male Kingbird would stubbornly try to hold his ground, but there were repeated attacks by the male Oriole. Today when I took this photo, it looks like the Orioles have won out and the Kingbirds have move to another location.