Bird Nests and Construction Behaviour

The nest profile survey

Nests are materials arranged in a particular way. Understanding the process of construction of a nest (Chapter 4) would therefore benefit from a detailed description of what materials appear and how they are arranged. This is equally true for speculation on functional design (Chapter 5) or on nest evolution (Chapter 9). The premise for this, however, is that nest architecture is species specific. Fortunately, evidence from a variety of animal builders gives support to this assumption.

Variations in nest architecture have been used to assist species recognition in the termite genus Apicotermes in which the morphology of the termites themselves shows little evidence of distinctiveness (Schmidt 1955). Taxa identified in this way have been termed ethospecies, because the clearest evidence of speciation comes from the behavioural record. Stenogastrine wasps of the genus Eustenogaster exhibit this pattern, with varied yet distinctive nest morphs apparently representing several species in the morphologically rather uniform genus (Hansell 1984, see Fig. 1.4). In bird literature there is a general acceptance that nests have species-specific characteristics (Collias & Collias 1984), and bird natural history books may be found in which descriptions of nests alone provide the basis for species identification (e.g. Harrison 1975). The problem with such published nest descriptions, apart from their brevity, is the lack of any systematic scheme for describing the composition and arrangement of nest materials and other key nest characters such as their dimensions or weight.