Cut scraps of fabric, yarn, string, and ribbon into short strips (3-4 inches in length should be safe). Stuff them into one of those mesh bags from tangelos or satsuma oranges and hang the big ball of stuff in a tree. Voila - instant nesting materials for local birds!

Other items to consider for your supply cache include dried grass, spanish moss, dog or human hair, pine needles, feathers, and thin twigs. (Thanks to Erin for letting us know that dryer lint is a no-no - despite its recommendation in numerous other sources, it might contain chemicals and doesn't hold up in weather; the latter means it could result in a weak nest after some spring weather.)

We ate Satsumas like fiends this winter, so Zella and Jenni made a few bags of nesting materials using this method. We always have scraps of fabric and plenty of yarn around, and Jenni even fashioned one materials holder by wrapping thin-gauge wire around a large wooden egg and then somehow separating the two. With a little more polish you'd be on to a cheap springtime gift or favor for kids you know to fill with their own household and yard nesting finds.

Jeremiah and Z have been saving up a variety of items for another "Nature Box," and spent a couple of hours this weekend putting it together. It's more varied than their previous nature boxes, and includes:

• A real or concrete-generated fossil of a small clamshell Z found in our driveway


• A tuft of animal fur from the road, probably rabbit


• Half of a geode purchased at a museum and smashed in our driveway with a hammer


• A painted shell Z bought in on a trip to Galveston with her grandmother


• A dragonfly found in our yard


• Two moths, one found on our porch and the other in our garden


• An inch-long thorny leaf tip from a century plant (large agave) from our driveway


• A dead ladybug and a dead cranefly, both from our home office


• Part of a bird's egg found on a walk in a local park

One of the most interesting developments for this project, though, was the "map" they created in the box lid to identify specimens. Jeremiah drew circles to indicate each object, and then Z labeled them, and learned in the process how the "map" (a legend, really) can show a viewer what is in the box, without directly labeling the objects themselves. We've been working a lot on maps lately - a topic we'll discuss in another post soon on Punnybop, as it all started with a couple of great kids' books - and this plays into that learning well. As Z is busy learning to write, we are also very keen to use applications that are highly purposeful and meaningful to her, and labeling something she can refer to later offers tangible evidence of the value of writing things down!

We are slowly working our way through a stash of cigar boxes after wildly stockpiling them over a few trips to our local liquor warehouse, which sells them for a quarter to a dollar-fifty apiece. Some readers will remember our first cigar box display case, which consisted of imagined items from nature that were actually scraps of fabric, vintage buttons, or pieces of craft foam:


If you missed it, you can read about that project and see more photos in the Z Recommends archives.

I try to strike a very balance in these collaborations, guiding Z just enough to help channel her imaginative ideas into results that remain thematic. We frequently develop tangential ideas that I encourage her to think about for the next project. That way we don't end up with a dozen (or more!) boxes of equally jumbled ideas. But the driving force is hers.

A month or so ago we made this one, an elephant watering hole. Her idea.




Looks like a scene of carnage to me, but in fact (she will happily tell you) the elephants are swimming. She enjoys looking at it with her magnifying glass, which I'll blog about when it turns up. We searched a long time for a good one, and it was cheap, too.

Our next box was a while in the making, as we collected real natural objects (mostly) to be included in the box over a couple of months.


I cut down some 6x6" corkboard pieces we had lying around for a padded backing to help with pinning. I thought it would make a nice background, but when Z suggested adding paper I realized that the cork would probably mute the detail of some of the more interesting objects in the box. We used simple straight pins to hold the delicate items in place, and craft glue for the shells, glass bead, and skeleton hand. I had to angle the pins pretty sharply to fit them in the box.

Dried flowers or other plant material would have been a nice addition, but our process was simpler - if she found something, we grabbed it and popped it in the collecting area (another cigar box) until we had enough.


The fake skeleton hand was attached to a fake skeleton arm on a keychain from her grandmother, which I really wanted to include, don't ask me why - I guess I find such blends of real and surreal funny, because it is so descriptive of the way her mind works so well at the age of four. She wasn't interested in the arm but when I suggested we could break the hand free, she suddenly liked the idea very much.


The strange bug-shaped thing is the discarded exoskeleton of a cicada, which I found on a leaf of the wisteria I have been trying to kill intermittently for over a year. Cicadas emerge from them and the shells are fascinatingly contoured to the shape of the body that was inside. Still more amazing is that the cicadas split the back open and emerge without destroying the skeleton. Here, you can see the roughly two-hour process in a thirty-second time-lapse video:



Stunning, isn't it?

The butterfly we found (dead) in the grass. A rare thing. I didn't dare try to extend its wings any more than you see here, for fear of breaking it apart.