What can nest-building birds teach us?
Abstract
For many years nest building in birds has been considered a remarkable behaviour. Perhaps just as remarkable is the public and scholarly consensus that bird nests are achieved by instinct alone. Here we take the opportunity to review nearly 150 years of observational and experimental data on avian nest building. As a result we find that instinct-alone is insufficient to explain the data: birds use information they gather themselves and from other individuals to make nest-building decisions. Importantly, these data confirm that learning plays a significant role in a variety of nest-building decisions. We outline, then, the multiplicity of ways in which learning (e.g., imprinting, associative learning, social learning) might act to affect nest building and how these might help to explain the diversity both of nest-building behaviour and in the resulting structure. As a consequence, we contend that nest building is a much under-investigated behaviour that holds promise both for determining a variety of roles for learning in that behaviour as well as a new model system for examining brain-behaviour relationships.
Citation
Breen , A J , Guillette , L M & Healy , S D 2016 , ' What can nest-building birds teach us? ' , Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews , vol. 11 , pp. 83-102 . https://doi.org/10.3819/ccbr.2016.110005
Publication
Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1911-4745Type
Journal article
Rights
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. All restrictions under this license are retained by the authors.
Description
We thank the School of Biology at the University of St Andrews for funding (AJB) and the BBSRC (LMG: BB/M013944/1 and SDH: BB/I019634/1).Collections
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