The Intelligence of Bird Nests

Among life’s small, durable joys is the discovery of a bird’s nest: perhaps in the shape of a bowl, woven from grasses and stems with a skill that seems inexplicable. How could a creature with such a small brain, equipped only with beak, feet, and wings, create something so exquisite, so far beyond my own capacities?

At some point in my life, I came to think that nest-building was a purely instinctive behavior rather than an expression of intelligence. I don’t recall where I heard that; it was part of the ambient conventional wisdom, which held that birds enter the world with the knowledge somehow encoded in their brains, then construct their nests in a rote enactment of those innate instructions. Over the past decade or so, however, a new wisdom has challenged the conventional.