Pokémon GO Nests: what are they and how to find them

While not all Pokémon are birds (or even organic lifeforms), a lot of them share certain general instincts, including nesting. Just like in real life when you find a bird’s nest, a nest of Pokémon is often teeming with young life, ripe for the catching. So, what exactly are Nests in Pokémon GO, and how does one find them?

What are Pokémon GO Nests?

Alongside all of the usual spawn-boosting events that occur regularly in Pokémon GO, migrating Nests are a great way to track down large groups of a particular kind of Pokémon. Nests can technically spawn anywhere in the entire world, though they tend to occur more frequently near Gyms, PokéStops, and generally populated areas, presumably to keep people from walking into the ocean. Nests are helpful because they give you access to a large quantity of a single Pokémon species without requiring you to wait for an event, so if you’re feeling picky about CPs, you have some room to shop around.

How to find Nests in Pokémon GO

So, how do you track down a nest? Well, that’s where things get tricky. Nests have two primary elements of randomness to them: first, they migrate every two weeks. There’s no way of knowing where a Nest will pop up, nor if another will take its place when it migrates. Secondly, the kind of Pokémon that will populate a Nest is also random. While not every Pokémon in the PokéDex can populate a Nest, a very large portion of them can, far too many to list here. So if a Nest pops up nearby with Pokémon you don’t care about, you’re just out of luck.

However, thanks to the efforts of the playerbase, there are at least ways to track the patterns of Nests. Pokémon GO fansite Silph Road maintains a real-time crowd-sourced atlas of Nests all over the world. When new Nests are discovered, users send in reports to Silph Road, which then updates the map with the Nest’s location and the kind of Pokémon it houses. It’s not a solution for the randomness, but at least it’ll let you know when there’s a Nest in your vicinity and whether you should bother checking it out.