Sylvia's Alpaca Nesting Heart

3 days ago Advertorial Sylvia Wintle

“There was a nest in my hedge made of plastic. Not one natural thread in it.”

A retired district nurse from the Cotswolds noticed something most British garden birdwatchers never do — and the answer was standing in her own paddock. Now, after the last clip of their herd, she is letting the final hearts go.

Sylvia Wintle at the drystone wall on her smallholding at Blockley, holding one of the alpaca nesting hearts — Sylvia Wintle (67) at Blockley, Gloucestershire. After thirty-eight years of district nursing, retirement finally gave her time to watch what was happening in her own garden.

Blockley, Gloucestershire, September. There is a bench by the back door, set against the warm stone where it catches the first of the sun. Sylvia Wintle has taken her tea out there every morning since she handed in her rota in 2019, and every morning she watches the paddock.

She has always noticed things other people walk straight past. Thirty-eight years of district nursing will do that — you learn to walk into a room and see what has changed since last week. But it was not until that first spring with no calls to make that she had the time to properly look.

What she saw stopped her cold.

The quiet danger your bird table cannot fix

A British garden bird nest woven through with orange baler twine, blue string, green pea netting and shredded horticultural fleece — A real nest, lifted out of a hedge in a Gloucestershire garden this year. Orange baler twine, blue polypropylene string, green pea netting, a shred of horticultural fleece — and barely any natural fibre left.

The birds kept coming. Goldfinches on the feeder. A robin that worked the same border every year. Wrens picking along the foot of the wall. Sylvia had always assumed they found what they needed out there — moss, grass, a bit of down. That is what birds do.

But once she started watching properly, she saw something else. A jackdaw carrying a length of orange baler twine. A robin with a thread of horticultural fleece trailing behind it. And, deep in the blackthorn by the gate, a nest with a strand of green pea netting wound right through the rim of the cup.

“It was not laziness. They simply could not find anything better. And I had never once thought to ask why.”

What she read afterwards was hard to sit with. Synthetic fibres — nylon, polypropylene twine, netting, the white fleece people throw over their vegetable beds — do not break down inside a nest. They stay rigid. When chicks hatch and start shifting about, a thin strand can wind around a leg, a wing or a throat, and it tightens rather than loosens. Wildlife carers have a name for it: fibre entanglement. And almost no British garden birdwatcher has ever heard of it.

It is not a rare curiosity, either. A nest built entirely from plastic fibres — not a scrap of natural material in it — has been described in a British ornithological journal. It belonged to one of our smallest garden birds, the one that builds the most extraordinary nest in these islands. And it had nothing else to work with.

⚠ What Sylvia learnt the hard way

Soft nesting material has all but vanished from British gardens Most gardens have a feeder, a bird table, perhaps a nest box. But the loose, untidy material birds once lined their nests with — fine grasses, plant down, animal hair — has been mulched, mown and tidied away. The birds keep searching. What they find is plastic.

Synthetic fibre does not behave like natural fibre — and birds cannot tell the difference Unlike wool or plant fibre, synthetics do not compress safely around a developing chick. They hold their shape. A thin strand gets tighter over time, not looser. By the time there is anything to see, it is usually too late.

Britain’s earliest builders begin in February — and the nest takes three weeks They weave roughly six thousand separate pieces of moss and lichen, bind the whole thing with spider silk, and line it with as many as two thousand feathers. They start long before anyone thinks of nesting season. Whatever is hanging in your garden when they begin is what goes into that nest.

“Fibre entanglement is something we see every single spring. Chicks come in with synthetic thread wound around a leg or a throat, and almost always it has come from nesting material a parent bird collected in a nearby garden. Natural fibre such as alpaca fleece compresses and breaks down safely. Synthetic fibre does neither. It really is that simple.”

Dr Frances Aldridge, Ph.D. Avian Ecologist & Wildlife Rehabilitator · Windrush Valley Wildlife Care, Northleach, Gloucestershire

“I had had a bird table out there for fifteen years,” Sylvia says. “I thought I was doing my bit. I had no idea what they were actually building with.”

The morning a jackdaw landed on her alpaca — and started pulling

A jackdaw standing on the back of an alpaca, pulling a tuft of fleece free with its beak — Jackdaws take wool and hair straight off the backs of living animals — it is well documented on sheep in North Wales and on the deer in Richmond Park. Sylvia simply happened to be watching hers.

Gordon has kept a small herd on the place since 2006 — eleven alpacas on four acres, more hobby than business. He spent forty-six years laying hedges and building drystone walls across Gloucestershire. There is always a half-used roll of rabbit netting in the shed; there always has been.

That first spring of Sylvia’s retirement, she watched a jackdaw drop onto the back of one of the brown wethers and stay there. She assumed it was after flies. Then it lifted off with a beakful of fleece and flew straight up to the chimney stack.

It came back the next morning. And the morning after that. For a fortnight.

“The birds worked it out long before I did. I only noticed what they had been telling me all along.”

So Gordon cut a heart out of the end of a roll of rabbit netting — freehand, about four minutes’ work — packed the hexagons full of fleece from that year’s clip and hung it in the old damson tree by the wall on a length of chain. Partly as a retirement present. Mostly so the jackdaws would stop climbing all over the alpacas.

It came out crooked. He never straightened it.

He used four fleeces, because that was what was sitting in the barn: dark brown off Bramble, cream off one of the white girls, caramel, and the charcoal grey from the old wether the jackdaws liked best. Four colours in one heart. Sylvia has packed every one the same way since.

A small garden bird pulling a strand of cream alpaca fleece from the wire mesh heart in a damson tree — The first heart Gordon ever cut. Still crooked. Still hanging in the same damson tree it has always hung in.

The nest she found was not the one she was expecting

Within a fortnight the heart had been pulled nearly bare. Sylvia went looking for the jackdaws’ handiwork up on the chimney, and found something else entirely on the way back down the garden.

Tucked deep into the blackthorn by the gate was the nest of one of our smallest birds. If you have never seen one: it is a domed purse, elastic, built from moss and pale lichen and stitched together with spider silk, with a neat round door near the top. It takes a pair the best part of three weeks.

The inside of that nest should have held one and a half thousand feathers.

It was lined with cream alpaca fleece off her own paddock.

Eight eggs. Seven fledged.

A domed nest of moss and lichen in a blackthorn hedge, lined inside with soft cream alpaca fleece — Moss, lichen and spider silk on the outside. Soft alpaca fleece where the feathers should have been. Not a thread of plastic anywhere in it.

Sylvia spent five years quietly solving a problem most British gardeners do not know exists. What she built is still available — but only from the final clip of their herd.

See Sylvia’s Nesting Heart →

The one material birds hunt for every spring — and almost never find

Alpaca fleece is different in nearly every way that matters to a nesting bird:

Naturally hollow fibre — alpaca fleece is hollow through the core, so it insulates far better than most materials. A nest lined with it holds warmth through a cold Cotswold night in March, which matters enormously for eggs and newly hatched chicks.
No lanolin, no additives — unlike sheep’s wool, alpaca fleece carries no lanolin. It is soft, clean and gentle against a chick’s skin from its first day out of the shell.
Breaks down safely — where synthetic thread stays rigid, alpaca fleece compresses and breaks down naturally inside the nest. It does not hold a loop and poses no entanglement risk.
Soft enough for lining — birds use coarse material for the outer structure and line the inside with the softest thing they can find. Alpaca fleece sits at the very top of that list, which is exactly why the jackdaws go after it at the source.
Sheds moisture — alpaca fibre repels water naturally, so the lining stays dry through a wet British spring rather than turning into a cold, sodden mat.

“Birds do not need any of this explained to them,” Sylvia says. “The first heart we ever hung out had a jackdaw on it inside the hour.”

🪡 Hang It On a branch, a fence post or the washing line. Anywhere birds already come.

🐦 Birds Find It They pull the fleece out themselves — no setting up, no coaxing. They know exactly what it is.

🥚 Nests Get Lined Soft, warm, safe fibre. No entanglement risk. The way it is meant to be.

🍂 Hang it now and it is weathered in and waiting. This is the final batch — made from the last clip of Sylvia and Gordon’s herd before the place is sold after Christmas.

Get Yours Before The Last Ones Go → Free UK delivery · Dispatched within 2 working days · While stocks last

“The neighbours started asking. Then people I used to nurse.”

Sylvia packing raw alpaca fleece into a wire mesh heart at her kitchen table — Sylvia packs every heart by hand — only the soft inner fleece, the part a bird would pick for itself if it could.

Sylvia made more hearts after that first spring. Gordon cut the frames from netting offcuts; she packed the hexagons with the season’s fleece, four colours to a heart. One went on the post by the lane. One in the old apple tree. One on the corner of the barn.

By May she had more nesting activity on the place than she had ever seen. Robins, a pair of goldfinches, chaffinches in the hedge, and a pair of wrens that had never bothered with the garden before.

Then the neighbours started noticing. Then asking. Then pulling up at the gate — and after them, half the people she used to call on with her nursing bag.

“I gave them away for five years,” Sylvia laughs. “It never occurred to me to sell them. I had a paddock full of alpacas and a husband who could cut wire. It seemed like the obvious thing to do.”

It was their daughter Claire who finally put her foot down. Christmas 2024, she sat at the kitchen table with her laptop and set the shop up while Sylvia was doing the sprouts. “She did not even tell me she was doing it,” Sylvia says. “She just turned the screen round when it was finished.”

Sylvia standing among her alpaca herd in the paddock, holding a finished nesting heart — Sylvia in the paddock at Blockley. The herd has grazed this slope since 2006. This is the last of their fleece.

“I would sooner it went to the birds than to the tip.”

Sylvia and Gordon are moving after Christmas — down into the village, closer to Claire and the grandchildren at Cheltenham. Four acres has quietly become too much, and forty-six years of kneeling on stone have caught up with Gordon’s knees. The eleven alpacas are going to a friend’s place over at Winchcombe, near enough that they can call in on them.

June’s clip was the last one. Every heart left is made from that fleece. When they are gone, there will not be more — there is no next season to make them from.

“People ask whether I am sad about it,” Sylvia says. “I am not. The next part is starting. I just wanted the last of them to go to people who will actually hang them out.”

This is what customers said about it.

🍃“Hung one on the apple tree a fortnight ago and within three days I had goldfinches on it every morning. I have had a bird table out there for years and never seen that kind of carry-on. My granddaughter is obsessed — she wants to check it before school.”

— Margaret H., 64, Shrewsbury, Shropshire

🍃“I had never given nesting material a single thought. Once I read about the netting I could not stop noticing it in my own garden — I had fleece shredding off the veg beds all winter. Put one out by the hedge and something had started pulling at it by the end of the week.”

— Alison P., 58, Otley, West Yorkshire

🍃“Bought two — one for me, one for Mum, who is the real birdwatcher. She went quiet when I told her the story behind them. The fleece is nothing like the stuff you get at a garden centre. You can tell someone actually made these.”

— Deborah C., 61, Truro, Cornwall