Our Little Nest

nest
My hand is in the picture for size comparison purposes, of course, but isn’t that a beautiful ring, too?
Since we couldn’t access a lot of websites today, Betty and I ended up catching up on a ton of chores we needed to do, one of which was to take out the air conditioner. Yes, we’re way late, but really – it was pretty warm in NYC until like a week ago.
Anyway, we finally took it out, cats carefully locked in one room while we pulled it out of the window, and what did our wondering eyes descry? That nest we entirely forgot about. It made the cats nuts this spring – the birds scritching and peeping right there but entirely out of reach. Now we’ve put it in a box in hope that we might do something cool & groovy with it, though I don’t know what.
Two questions for all you, then:
1) What do we do with it? Art projects type, do let us know.
2) What kind of birds were they? We never even got to see them. Can anyone tell just from what the nest looks like?
It is an engineering marvel, to be sure. We’re thinking now we may even use it to fashion the inside of a bird house, because it’s amazingly, solidly, built. That way it’ll make some birds a good home again next year, too.