Although the goal is simple, Dr. King calls the experiment “ugly” because the rich system has an overabundance of factors at play. “This makes the problem not easily amenable to elegant theory or simple analysis,” he said.

Dr. King has been pursuing this line of investigation for several years. As research problems go, it’s a bird’s nest of a bird’s nest: All the input parameters and boundary conditions are interwoven, in ways that prove difficult to tease apart.

More than a metaphor

The paper recently published by Dr. King and his collaborators primarily reviews the field of nest research, such as it is.

One reference on Dr. King’s bookshelf is a classic title by Mike Hansell, “Bird Nests and Construction Behavior.” Dr. Hansell, a professor emeritus of animal architecture at the University of Glasgow, conducted field work in museum collections around the world. At the Natural History Museum in London, for instance, he found “an unremarkable looking cup nest of grass and rootlets” by the now extinct piopio (Turnagra capensis) of New Zealand.

“The bird itself was last observed in 1947,” he wrote. “Possibly no other nest of this species remains in the world. It is an enduring expression of behavior that can no longer be seen. To touch it is to be as close to its maker as to touch a brush stroke of a Van Gogh sunflower.”

In cascading chapters and subsections, Dr. Hansell explored topics like nest shape, decoration and size, and the nest as a factor in mate selection. For the blue-footed booby, nest-building is “reduced to the exaggerated presentation of tiny pieces of vegetation by the male to the female, a trait that might well be expected to be under the influence of sexual selection,” he wrote, with a nod to Charles Darwin.