I think the dog and the bird are two different mechanisms. As far as I can remeber from my comparative psychology (all those years ago!).
I recall birds would use Fixed Action Patterns for some of their behaviour. When you kick an egg of the Greylag Goose out of its' nest the bird will dutifull use its' beak to roll the the egg back into the nest. Now, if you are an even bigger meany and pick the egg up, the goose will keep rolling a non existant egg as if the egg were still in its' field of view.
The behaviour is a fixed action pattern that does not change, a bit like our startle reflex. Once it's 'fired' it will go on to completion. No learning there.
Based on this flimsy memory over 10 years old I would say that the birds nest IS hard wired. I don't see why the nest building behaviour cannot modify by experience, but the 'build nest here' imperitive is probly hard wired.
Dogs on the other hand have 'looser' wiring and can social learn too. I have read about cunning little black bears scampering up snow difts to 'mark' their trees too.
This brings me to my final flimsy memory: Preparedness. This (as I recall) is a species' predisposition towards learning 'things'. Humans' is language and facial recognition (among others), cats is stalking, song birds singing etc. the bear bones of the behaviour is there, but learning via the gift of experience fine tunes it to react to the environment.
So there you have my ultimate cop out answer: a species has some level of hard wired behaviour such as jumping in fright or shock, to an experience modifide behaviour such as modifying the startle reflex into 'combat reflexes' of a trained soldier.