A bird nest is the spot in which a bird lays and incubates its eggs and raises its young. Although the term is popular in reference to a specific structure made by the bird itself—such as the grassy cup nest of the American Robin or Eurasian Blackbird, or the elaborately woven hanging nest of the Montezuma Oropendola, the Village Weaver or the Red-browed Pardalote—that is too restrictive a definition. For some species, a nest is simply a shallow depression made in sand; for others, it is the knot-hole left by a broken branch, a burrow dug into the ground, a chamber drilled into a tree, an enormous rotting pile of vegetation and earth, or a mud dome with an entrance tunnel. Some species of cave swiftlets of the genus Collocalia make their nests entirely from their saliva, which dries and hardens to form a bracket on the cave wall into which the birds lay their eggs. The smallest bird nests are those of some hummingbirds, tiny cups which can be a mere 2 cm (less than one inch) across and 2–3 cm (about one inch) high. At the other extreme, some nest mounds built by the Dusky Scrubfowl measure more than 11 m (34 ft) in diameter and stand nearly 5 m (15 ft) tall.

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