Social interactions are an important factor in determining organismal fitness and frequently change in response to challenging conditions. Extra-territorial visitation behavior is one particularly poorly understood form of social interaction which appears to be common in birds. Understanding the patterns and drivers of these and other social interactions in wild animals can be challenging; however, long-term, automated data collection can provide new insights, particularly when paired with experimental manipulations of the environmental context in which those interactions occur. Here, I explored a social nest visitation behavior in a wild population of tree swallows in Ithaca, NY. In Chapter 1, using a 12-year automated monitoring dataset, I explored patterns of visitation from thousands of visits and hundreds of nests. With those patterns, I evaluated multiple, non-exclusive hypotheses to explain visitation prevalence. Visitation patterns were inconsistent with commonly supported hypotheses for extra-territorial visitation (mistakes, extra-pair mating, competition for nest sites, or prospecting) and instead were consistent with both the social byproduct and information gathering hypotheses. In Chapter 2, I tested whether glucocorticoids influenced this social visitation behavior. Using an experimental manipulation to increase circulating corticosterone levels, I found that birds with experimentally elevated corticosterone made more trips to neighbors' nests, particularly during early and late nestling stages. These results suggest that glucocorticoids promote social behavior and access to nest-based social information, a potential benefit following challenging conditions. In Chapter 3, I explored a different organismal response to better understand the timescales over which tree swallows respond to challenging weather conditions during breeding. Specifically, I examined how weather conditions alter the energetic response to a subsequent acute challenge in breeding female tree swallows. Using a three-year dataset, I assessed if weather over 3- or 72-hour timescales predicted baseline and stress-induced glucose levels. Weather conditions did not affect baseline glucose; however, birds that experienced lower temperatures over the preceding 72 hours had higher stress-induced glucose when faced with an acute stressor. These findings support the idea that the glucose stress response may be primed by exposure to prior challenges. In Chapter 4, I investigated how natural temperature variation and experimental nest cooling affect social nest visitation behavior. Social visitation behavior decreased at extreme temperatures, particularly as temperatures declined, with each additional prior day below 18.5°C further decreasing visit frequency. However, experimental nest cooling did not affect visitation rates. This indicated that cold weather may influence social behavior through its effects on food availability. This decline in social interactions could represent a hidden cost to breeding tree swallows through reducing access to social information. Together, this research demonstrates that social nest visitation in tree swallows is best explained by providing an avenue to gather social information from neighboring conspecifics among a closely aggregated population of wild birds. The frequency of these social interactions is influenced by both physiological mediators (glucocorticoids promote visitation) and environmental constraints (extreme temperatures reduce visitation). Social information gathering represents an important but underappreciated component of social interaction in wild organisms.