IN WESTERN LIBERIA, 191 



kept up a continual and deafening chatter the whole day 

 long when building their nests , which was fully one day's 

 work. As soon as one had brought along some suitable 

 material and disappeared to get some more , another , ap- 

 parently more lazy, came on to tear away what the first 

 had built, and use it for his own purpose. A tremendous 

 alarm and furious fight was always the result of such 

 burglary, and palaver was not settled before some feathers 

 were lost and some blood was shed. Not seldom we found 

 colonies of H, textor far from human habitations , even in 

 forests. It is very peculiar that these birds like to settle 

 in trees , where Haliaetus angolensis has built its airy , so 

 that , in the Cape Mount Country , really hardly such an 

 airy is found without being surrounded by a colony of 

 those noisy weavers. Whether the first likes to have such 

 an animated society and builds its airy amongst the co- 

 lony , or the weavers do the same for security , I do not 

 know, but as the huge airy lasts much longer than the 

 pouches of the weavers, I think the latter reason more 

 probable. At the harvest-time these birds, like most of 

 their congeners are a plague to the rice-fields which they 

 visit in enormous clouds. On account of that, all the 

 weavers together are called » rice-birds" by the Liberian 

 settlers , and the latter as well as the native rice-farmers 

 are compelled to keep watch and drive the birds away. 



Nest and eggs of this species can hardly be distinguish- 

 ed from those of H. castaneofusca. The former is of a 

 globular form , almost like a snail-shell , with the hole un- 

 derneath , and fastened to the end of a twig so that a 

 tree with such a colony of weavers looks as if it was over- 

 loaded with large fruits. The materials , used for that 

 purpose, are generally the leaves of a very strong kind 

 of reed or , in its absence , the leaves of palmtrees. A 

 small bite is first made in the lower part of the leaf and 

 the bird then seizing in its bill the fiber next the bitten 

 place flies off holding it firmly in its beak and thus tear- 

 ing off a long strip of the leaf which it takes to its 



Notes from the Leyclen Miuseum , A^ol. VII. 



