Tiny abandoned bird nests in UK woman's hair for 84 days

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A bored and homesick English woman living in Africa became a human nest for a weakling finch for nearly three months.

“Each day, he made little ‘nests’ in my hair, on the groove of my collarbone, which filled me with awe,” Hannah Bourne-Taylor, a London-based photographer and copywriter, told The Guardian this week.

“He’d tuck himself under a curtain of hair and gather individual strands with his beak, sculpting them into a round of woven locks, resembling a small nest, then settling inside,” she continued. “He would allow it to unravel when he was done and start again the next day.”

Bourne-Taylor and her husband, Robin, moved to Ghana in 2013, when he took a job there. But she was unable to work because of visa restrictions and had few friends or neighbors.

“I was left isolated, homesick and lacking purpose,” she said. She took solace in nature.

“After one particularly bad (September 2018) thunderstorm, I found a fledgling – a bronze-winged mannikin finch – barely a month old, on the ground,” Bourne-Taylor said. “He was abandoned by his flock, his nest blown from the mango tree. His eyes were tightly shut and he was shuddering, too young to survive alone. He was the size of my little finger, with feathers the color of rich tea biscuits, inky eyes and a small bill like a pencil lead.”

The little finch and human quickly bonded.

“The next day, he woke with his mouth open and a shrill hunger call. I fed him termites and, instinctively, chirped at him,” Bourne-Taylor said. “He chirped back and clambered into my hand, digging in his beak and head, then fell asleep in my palm. As far as he was concerned, I was his mother. For the next 84 days, the fledgling lived on me.”

The finch finally grew strong enough by the end of the year to join his flock.

When she returned from Christmas break, in January, “I’d watch out for him when the finches flew past,” Bourne-Taylor said. “Every now and then, one would hang back, on a branch, and stare at me. I still cry when I think of him.

“Raising him taught me how to live in the present and changed me forever,” she added. “Last year, when we returned to Oxfordshire, I joined local conservation efforts and wrote our story into a book, ‘Fledgling.’ That, along with the lesson that any tiny animal can make a difference, will be his legacy.”

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