Sharon Beals is a San Francisco based photographer who has photographed nest and eggs specimens collected over the last two centuries at The California Academy of Sciences, The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, and The Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology. While few nests are collected today, these nests and eggs are used for research, providing important information about their builder’s habitats, DNA, diseases and other survival issues.

Fish weighing over 80 kilogram is cooked in a hotpot during a food festival in Zhengzhou, Henan province, China, October 17, 2015. (Photo by Reuters/Stringer)

A girl carries on her head a pile of dried shrubs she gathered for cooking and heating, in Kabul, Afghanistan November 18, 2015. (Photo by Omar Sobhani/Reuters)

A man shouts slogans demanding cooking gas cylinders as a group of people block an intersection protesting against shortages of essentials in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Saturday, May 7, 2022. (Photo by Eranga Jayawardena/AP Photo)

In this June 16, 2017 photo, Batel Delciner, 23, removes wood from a furnace to lower the heat cooking sugar juice at the Ti Jean distillery, which produces clairin, a sugar-based alcoholic drink, in Leogane, Haiti. The broth is cooked for about four hours after a fermentation period of four to eight days. (Photo by Dieu Nalio Chery/AP Photo)

CHINA: Customers eat at a restaurant as a cooked pig sits on a cart on the street outside in Hong Kong, China, December 12, 2016. (Photo by David Gray/Reuters)

Brad Snead walks past melting ice on the Cook Inlet beach, Saturday, March 26, 2011, in Kenai, Alaska, while looking for agates. (AP Photo/Peninsula Clarion, M. Scott Moon)

The Queen Mary 2 is saluted by the HMB Endeavour, the replica of Captain James Cook's ship, on March 4, 2012 off the coast of Victoria, Australia. (Photo by James Morgan/Carnival Australia via Getty Images)