296 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1949 
While my own field notes are less detailed for any one species of 
weaver than are Ali’s on the Baya, I found males of a dozen or more 
related African species actively engaged in nest building. In the 
cases where my notes are fullest (the Cape weaver, Ploceus capensis 
olivaceus, the black-headed weaver, Ploceus nigriceps nigriceps, and 
the Kenya vitelline weaver, Ploceus witellinus uluensis) my observa- 
tions indicate that the male does most of the nest weaving, if not all 
of it. In some other species (Jackson’s weaver, Ploceus jacksoni, and 
the spotted-backed weaver, Ploceus spilonotus) there seemed to be 
more activity among the females in this regard but still the bulk of the 
building was carried on by the males. (It may be that some of the 
“females” were really males in nonbreeding plumage, a point that 
could have been determined only by more collecting at the time. 
That this is not unlikely may be adduced from the fact that in my 
field notes on the masked weaver, Ploceus velatus arundinarius, I 
wrote that the females take part in the nest-building activities, but 
Taylor’s careful study of a slightly different subspecies of this bird, 
referred to above, convinced him that the males did all the actual 
construction and that the females merely added or rearranged some 
lining materials. It may well be that the birds I recorded as females 
were males that had not yet come into nuptial plumage.) Chestnut 
weavers (Ploceus rubiginosus), watched in captivity, showed more 
nest-building activity among males than females. Of Speke’s weaver 
(Ploceus spekei) van Someren (1916, p. 409) noted that, ‘‘dozens of 
nests are built by the male, but only one is occupied; thus there are 
always plenty of old nests in all stages of completion.” 
In one of the forest-dwelling, relatively solitary, or at least not highly 
colonial, typical weavers, Malimbus cassini, of West Africa, Bates (p. 
478) found that both sexes take care of the young. He shot a male 
and a female at their nest, which had, ‘‘. .. a woven entrance tube 2 or 
3 feet long, so thin that its walls were transparent, and the birds could 
be seen entering and leaving, feeding young.’’ In the Cape weaver, 
Ploceus olivaceus capensis, previously mentioned, Skead found that 
both parents fed the young, and it appears that this behavior is fairly 
widespread in the entire group. 
Another section of this subfamily contains the so-called bishop 
birds (Huplectes) and the whydahs (Coliuspasser and its close allies). 
These birds are far more terrestrial than the members of the genus 
Ploceus and their habits are somewhat different. Lack (1935, pp. 817 
ff.) studied the fire-crowned bishop (Huplectes hordacea hordacea) in 
Tanganyika Territory and found that the males are polygamous and 
do most of the nest building, each female merely finishing or lining the 
one it occupies, and each hen continuing to add to the nest throughout 
the period of incubation, eventually making it so thick that the ob- 
server can no longer see through it, and adding a small saclike ledge 
