How I Make a Natural Looking Bird Nest Part 1 Materials

I’ve had a lot of people ask me about making natural looking bird’s nests. I made a few last year when I was participating in a bird nest swap. It never occurred to me at the time that people might want to make nests for real birds. I’m not sure if the nests I make will work for living breathing birds, but I promised to do a tutorial. I have a few things I need to work on right now, so I thought I would do a several part blog tutorial. In this first post, I’m going to just talk about materials.

I use a minimum of 4 materials in my nests, bark covered wire, string, twigs and wool. You can make a nest using only a roll of grape vine and some wire, but I perfer to make a messier kind of nest.

I use bark covered wire and string to create an armature for my nest. I’m going to use sisal twine for this demo, but I have used ordinary household cotton string. You can buy the bark wrapped wire in the floral section of your local craft store. You can also find it online.

You can use some other materials in your nest as well. Rafia and moss work well in a natural looking nest. You can buy rafia, moss and even sisal at the dollar store. You can also be adventurous and collect materials from around your home or neighborhood to use in your nest.

I can collect many of the materials in my neighborhood. In fact I do use natural uncombed wool in my nests. For this particular demo, the untreated wool is the only material that I cannot buy my local craft store or dollar store.

Now that I’ve showed you the materials I use, I’m sure that some of you can already imagine how to put a nest together.  If you have some ideas, Go For It!  If not, wait for my nest post.

Here’s links to the other 2 parts of the tutorial.

Part 2 Armature

Part 3 Finishing Up

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