One person's trash is another bird's building material
During the fall of 2022, researchers at the St. Jones Reserve, a component of the Delaware National Estuarine Research Reserve, observed trash in songbird nests around the reserve’s visitor center. This past summer, Hollings scholar Eleanor Meng studied whether this trash occurred more frequently in nests near the visitor center compared to nests further away.
Eleanor Meng, a 2022 Hollings scholar, studied whether songbirds incorporated trash in their nests more often the closer they nested to the visitor's center of a nature reserve. Here, she is searching for bird nests in a shrub at the St. Jones Reserve, a region of Delaware National Estuarine Research Reserve. (Image credit: Abby Reed)