A nest is a place of refuge to hold an animal's eggs or provide a place to live or raise offspring. They are usually made of some organic material such as twigs, grass, and leaves; or may simply be a depression in the ground, or a hole in a tree, rock or building. Human-made materials, such as string, plastic, cloth, hair or paper, may also be used.
Generally each species has a distinctive style of nest. Nests can be found in many different habitats. They are built primarily by birds, but also by mammals (e.g. squirrels), fish, insects (e.g. wasps, termites and honey bees) and reptiles (e.g. snakes and turtles).
The urge to prepare an area for the building of a nest is referred to as the nesting instinct and may occur in both mammals (bears, gorillas, ...) and birds.
Read more about Nest: Bird Nest, Names of Nests, Gallery
Famous quotes containing the word nest:
“Far from her nest the lapwing cries away;
My heart prays for him, though my tongue do curse.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.... Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
—Harper Lee (b. 1926)
“How then can we account for the persistence of the myth that inside the empty nest lives a shattered and depressed shell of a woman—a woman in constant pain because her children no longer live under her roof? Is it possible that a notion so pervasive is, in fact, just a myth?”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)