OF WILD ANIMALS 65 



cutting it down with a rifle bullet is a more serious matter. 



To our Zoological Park visitors the African weaver birds are 

 a wonder and a delight. Orioles and caciques do not build 

 nests in captivity, but the weavers blithely transfer their 

 activities to their spacious cage in our tropical-bird house. 

 The bird-men keep them supplied with rafna grass, and they do 

 the rest. Fortunately for us, they weave nests for fun, and 

 work at it all the year round ! Millions of visitors have watched 

 them doing it. To facilitate their work the upper half of their 

 cage is judiciously supplied with tree-branches of the proper 

 size and architectural slant. The weaving covers many 

 horizontal branches. Sometimes a group of nests will be tied 

 together in a structure four feet long; and it branches up, or 

 down, or across, seemingly without rhyme or reason. 



Some of the weavers, which inhabit Africa, Malayana and 

 Australia, are "communal" nest-builders. They build colonies 

 of nests, close together. Imagine twenty-five or more Balti- 

 more orioles massing their nests together on one side of a 

 single tree, in a genuine village. That is the habit of some of 

 the weaver birds; and this brings us to what is called the 

 most wonderful of all manifestations of house-building in- 

 telligence among birds. It is the community house of the 

 little sociable weaver-bird of South Africa (Phildczrus socius). 

 Having missed seeing the work of this species save in museums, 

 I will quote from the Royal Natural History, written by the 

 late Dr. Richard Lydekker, an excellent description: 



"This species congregates in large flocks, many pairs in- 

 cubating their eggs under the same roof, which is composed of 

 cartloads of grass piled on a branch of some camel-thorn tree 

 in one enormous mass of an irregular umbrella shape, looking 

 like a miniature haystack and almost solid, but with the under 

 surface (which is nearly flat) honeycombed all over with little 

 cavities, which serve not only as places for incubation, but also 

 as a refuge against rain and wind. 



"They are constantly being repaired by their active little 



