Post Description

Animals build homes to provide a safe and stable place to raise a family. This three-part series investigates how animals build their amazing homes and the intriguing behaviors and social interactions that take place in and around them. Ecologist Chris Morgan serves as our guide and real estate agent, evaluating and deconstructing animal homes, their material, location, neighborhood and aesthetics.

Part 1: The Nest
Bird nests come in all shapes and sizes, crafted from an inexhaustible diversity of materials, including fur, grasses, leaves, mosses, sticks and twigs, bones, wool, mud and spider silk. Quite a few also contain man-made materials – colorful twine, bits of wire, even plastic bags. Each one is a remarkable work of art, built with just a beak! We begin with a museum collection of nests and branch out to scenes in the wild all over the world, where birds arrive at diverse nesting grounds to collect, compete for, reject, steal and begin to build with carefully selected materials, crafting homes for the all-important task of protecting their eggs and raising their young.
Part 2: Location Location Location
Finding a good base of operations is key to successfully raising a family. One must find the correct stream or tree, the correct building materials, neighbors and sometimes tenants. In the wild, every home is a unique DIY project, every head of household is a designer and engineer. Animated blueprints and tiny cameras chart the building plans and progress of beavers, tortoises and woodrats, examining layouts and cross sections, evaluating the technical specs of their structures and documenting their problem-solving skills. Animal architecture provides remarkable insights into animal consciousness, creativity and innovation.
Part 3: Animal Cities
Animals congregate in huge colonies partly out of necessity and partly for the security that numbers provide. Icelandic puffins form nesting colonies of more than a million, tucked in between hundreds of thousands of other seabirds, which provides shared information about food sources and reduces the odds of individual birds being attacked. But, colonies are also useful for predators. Social spiders in Ecuador work together to capture prey 20 times the size an individual might subdue on its own. For others, communal living provides perfect multi-generational caregiving options or the opportunity to build enormous cities – such as the acre-wide, multi-million-citizen colonies built by leaf cutter ants in Costa Rica.