Pokemon Go: What Does the ‘Different Pokemon May Be Appearing’ Notification Mean?

Niantic Pokemon Go is available for iOS and Android devices.

On Friday in Pokemon Go, the game greeted a lot of players with a notification saying, “Different Pokemon may be appearing in parks around you. It’s a great time to explore your local parks!” So what does this mean, exactly?

This new notification is meant to alert players to the existence of a new nest migration. In the game, nests are areas in the real world where the same species of Pokemon spawns at a high frequency; if you’ve ever gone to an area where a whole bunch of the same type of Pokemon spawns, it’s probably a nest. But every two weeks, Niantic switches things up so that different Pokemon spawn in those nests than did before. Sometimes nests don’t change, though, while sometimes they disappear completely and sometimes new ones are added.

Usually, these migrations have just ocurred without much fanfare every other Thursday. But this week, the nest migration was accompanied by a notification alerting players to the fact that new Pokemon have arrived near them; Niantic also sent out this notification two weeks ago. As the notification suggests, if you explore parks around you, different Pokemon may be appearing than did a day ago. Like a lot of things in Pokemon Go, however, no more information is provided by the game itself.

With nest migrations, it’s not as if the changes are universal, and so just because one Scyther nest changes to a Ponyta nest doesn’t mean all Scyther nests will do the same. However, one way to check on your local nests, other than actually going to visit them, is to take a look at The Silph Road’s atlas map. This map features icons over areas that have been reported to be nests, and if you click one, you’ll see information submitted from players about what species this nest spawns. If the information was submitted on July 27th or later, that means it’s up to date. If it was submitted before July 27th, it may no longer be accurate.

Pokemon Go nest migrations occur every two weeks, meaning the next one will happen on Thursday, August 10th.