How are unwitnessed behaviours (such as an adult bird building a nest the chick never saw the construction of) passed onto the next generation?
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It’s hard to imagine how a complex behaviour like nest building can be instinctual. Think of it as less of a piece of code or some blueprints that have been embedded in the brain from birth, and think of it as an automatic reaction to a particular stimuli. Just like how a human brain typically reacts with fear to the stimulus of seeing a spider. It’s an uncontrollable reaction that is hardwired into our brains.
Similarly, when a bird sees a twig and it’s brain receives that particular stimulus, combined with the innate desire to breed and raise young that all animals have, the way it automatically reacts is with an impulse to organise that stick into the shape of a nest.
It can’t control that impulse. A better example of a human equivalent would be how babies like to bite everything, because that is an action response instead of just an emotional response to a stimulus. Babies love to bite things, because it’s a human instinct to explore different things so we can learn what is edible. Plus it feels good to activate the reward centre associated with biting in the brain.
It’s the same for birds. They see a stick and their subconscious reaction is to want to pick it up, and then a separate reward centre in their brain tells them to organise it in the shape of a nest. Just like how we can’t really explain why some buildings look good and some look ugly, like, they’re both concrete cubes with window holes, but some look appealing and some look ugly. We don’t know why, they just do, because our brains respond that way. In the same way, a bird can’t explain why it finds the shape of a good nest so satisfying and appealing, it just does, so it’s driven to arrange all the sticks it bites into the shape of a nest.
Also I know nothing about birds and this is entirely my intuitive idea of what must happen inside a birds brain, based on their actions.
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