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The dryer lint advice you see all over Pinterest is actively bad for birds.
It sounds nice, save the lint, leave it in the yard, watch the birds use it for nests.
But Audubon, US Fish & Wildlife, the Cornell Lab, and most wildlife rehabbers all advise against it now, and the reasons add up fast.
Lint loses its structure when it gets wet. A nest lined with dryer lint holds up fine in dry weather, but the first heavy rain collapses the whole nest.
Eggs and chicks fall through the nest and likely don't survive.
Lint also carries with it the chemical signature of your laundry. Detergent residue, fabric softener, dryer sheet compounds, fragrance oils, and dye all end up concentrated in the fibers you're pulling out of the trap.
Even "free and clear" detergents leave trace chemicals that are fine on adult human skin but rough on a 4-gram baby bird.
Lint is mostly microplastic. Most modern clothing is polyester, nylon, acrylic, or some blend. The lint trap collects shredded synthetic fibers. Lining a nest with that is lining a nest with plastic.
Sadly, this folksy bird advice from a decade ago hasn't aged well. The new advice is closer to: provide nothing artificial, and let the natural materials in your yard do the work.


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