A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
drey
A drey is a squirrel’s nest, built as a ball of twigs, leaves, moss, and stripped bark wedged into a fork high in a tree and lined inside with soft material. It is distinct from a den, which is a cavity in a trunk. A drey is roughly the size of a football and looks from below like a clump of dead leaves that failed to fall, which is why they are easiest to count in winter.
Etymology
The origin of the word is unknown. It appears in English in the seventeenth century with no clear relatives, and the dictionaries record it as obscure and leave it there. That is unusual for a word this concrete and this old, and it puts drey in a small group of English animal-and-habitat words that arrived without a traceable parent, alongside brine and brook.
Notes
A single squirrel usually maintains several dreys and rotates between them, which reduces parasite load. Winter dreys are built thicker and lower than summer ones. An abandoned drey is often taken over by owls, and in Britain by dormice, so the structure outlasts the builder by several tenants.