In her comprehensive and carefully crafted book, Gisela Kaplan demonstrates how
intelligent and emotional Australian birds can be. She describes complex behaviours such …

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 …

Hosts of obligate avian brood parasites often evolve defense mechanisms to avoid rearing
unrelated young. One common defense is egg rejection, for which hosts often rely on …

Predation is a significant cause of nest failure in passerine birds, and, thus, natural selection
is expected to favor behavioral plasticity to allow birds to respond to perceived changes in …

Simple Summary For decades, numerous hypotheses have been suggested to explain why
nest characteristics should be associated with reproductive success. However, quantitative …

Various components of breeding success are predicted to be related to avian nest size
because (1) some individuals are physically able to build larger nests than other individuals …

Free-living birds in cities interact with humans and human-made objects. Here, we
investigated whether nesting in human-made structures that are physically unstable and …

Comparative studies predicted or reported weaker or stronger positive relationships
between nest size and body size both within and across avian species. Here we show that in …

Some avian species augment nest cups by building associated architectural structures that
may mitigate predation, parasitism, and/or hatching failure. Because effective nest …

Construction behavior is an aspect of the extended phenotype that allows organisms to build
structures that alter their environments in potentially beneficial ways. Although individuals …