More than any other kind of wildlife, birds have an almost magical hold on the human imagination. They are beautiful, vibrantly alive, and everywhere to be seen. They open our eyes to the world of nature. They enrich our Spirits with their color, their music, and their wondrous gift of flight.
For most of us, the term ‘bird’s nest’ conjures up an image of a cozy bowl made of twigs that safely cradles a bird’s delicate eggs and often the developing young. Yet beyond that basic design, the diversity of nest shapes, styles, and building materials is surpassed only by the variety of birds themselves.
Most bird behavior can be classified into one of two types: Social behavior or maintained behavior. Social behavior includes all the interactions between a bird and others of the same or different species. Maintenance behavior encompasses all the daily activities a bird uses to take care of its body.
Social behavior one of the most exciting aspects of bird’s lives is how they interact with others during such social activities as defending territories, courting mates, nesting, raising young, and flocking, birds’ level of scalability changes with the seasons; they may be gregarious at certain times of the year yet highly territorial at others.
Nests vary from simple to elaborate, and from small and compact to bulky and untidy. Some consist of layers of different types of materials; while some birds live in man made birdhouses; other like the ground scrapes of plovers, are made of nothing at all.
A nest/birdhouse may be located high on a pole, in a tree, on the ground, in an earthen burrow, a tree hole or almost anywhere in between.
