Nidicolous

Pronounced /nᵻˈdɪkələs/

If your offspring are proving recalcitrant or obstreperous you may like to hurl the epithet nidicolous at them. It will be accurate and tantalisingly unclear; it might even provoke them to crack open a dictionary to discover whether you’re insulting them.

The term is unlikely to be encountered outside a specialist and rather formal book on zoology or ornithology. I found it in the article on birds in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Latin scholars will recognise that the first part derives from the classical nidus, which is a relative of our nest as well as the source of niche and a component of a number of other specialist words. The second part is from the Latin verb colere to inhabit.

However, it’s more specialist than just “nest-living”. It refers specifically to a bird or other animal that’s hatched or born in an undeveloped state and that requires its parents to feed and care for it until it reaches maturity. Some young birds are the reverse of this — they leave the egg at least partially able to fend for themselves. They are said to be nidifugous, nest-fleeing. You may be reminded of newly hatched ducklings waddling after mum from their nest to reach water.

Curiously, English has another pair of terms which form an equivalent pair to nidicolous and nidifugous. You may instead use altricial and precocial, two terms introduced by the Swedish zoologist Carl Jakob Sundevall in 1836. He coined the former from classical Latin altrix, a foster mother or wet nurse, and the latter from scientific Latin praecoces, the plural of the classical Latin praecox, premature or early. Why both pairs should stay in use is unclear.