Home is the place where,
when you have to go there,
they have to take you in.
-Robert Frost

Do animals have homes? Are the instincts to return to a nest, a den, or a burrow the same as the homesickness we feel during the first few weeks of school? In fact, quite a few animals exhibit behaviors that suggest they have a sense of home.

Many animals decorate their homes to attract house guests. For example, spiders decorate their own webs in complex patterns to attract prey. Attraction is a reason humans decorate, as well; Askmen suggests men may attract women by keeping house plants.

Rock sparrows collect feathers (blue feathers) for their nests to indicate social status. Modern hipsters collect vinyl records for the same reasons.

Octopuses clean their homes every day and bring back items from their hunts, including garbage. I can't think of a single person I know who cleans their home every day; octopuses are alone on this one. I can, however, think of a few friends who leave garbage outside their homes.

Childhood-home nostalgia

Insects have been shown to remember the smells of their childhood homes after metamorphosis. They exhibit a preference for these childhood homes even after the extensive brain remodeling that occurs when an animal changes from a larval state to an adult form.

This kind of memory persistence suggests that even insects have a deep sense of home. This is actually a long-debated phenomenon in the scientific community because it is almost impossible to test this preference conclusively. I sometimes Lysol my house so that it smells more like home. Same thing?

Settling and lodging

Building homes to adapt to the environment is a unique behavior in the animal kingdom, mainly restricted to beavers and humans. Beavers build a complex system of lodges (complete with sleeping chamber) and dams for their family and community. They also think about insulation when building their homes to stay warm in the winter. Humans are settling less into homes for good nowadays. Justin Bieber, at 21 years old, is on his third home rental. This would be pretty reckless behavior for a beaver, since they put a lot of time and effort into the building of their homes.

As the pace of human society gets faster and more interconnected, will we grow away from the concept of a home? Certainly, part of how we build homes resembles the building, decorating, and memory-making that animals practice. As we build more websites than homes, decorate our Facebook profiles instead of our walls, and upload our memories to the cloud, maybe we will steer away from the ways of the beaver.