THE WEAVER 43IRDS. 13^ 



branch, with nothing directly under it, and, as a Palm 

 Tree affords many such situations, a palm tree, espe- 

 cially a Date Palm, is often fixed upon by a whole 

 company. In the museum of the Bombay Natural 

 History Society there is a branch of a Brab Palm with 

 fourteen nests attached to it. Where Palms are scarce 

 a thorny Babul or Bore tree, drooping over a tank, is a 

 favourite site for a colony. But you may find single 

 nests, or groups of nests, in all sorts of situations. 

 Jerdon says that in Burma the eaves of a thatched 

 bungalow are often fringed with nests. He counted 

 over a hundred hanging from the roof of a single 

 bungalow in Rangoon. One thing to note is that 

 there is never the slightest attempt at concealment. 

 The Weaver Bird will not elude its enemies : it defies 

 them. Having fixed on a site, the birds go to work 

 with a will, making their own yarn and weaving from 

 dawn till evening. Several kinds of material are 

 used. The best is very thin strips of cocoanut leaves. 

 The bird notches the edge of a leaf with its beak, and 

 then by main force tears off a long, thin fibre, scarcely 

 thicker than darning cotton. Any kind of rank grass 

 can be treated in the same way of course, and is much 

 easier to rend than a palm leaf, but the fibres are 

 softer and not nearly so strong. Grass nests are, 

 therefore, always more bulky and less closely woven 

 than those made of palm leaf. The process of build- 

 ing is as follows. The fibres are first wound and 

 twined very securely about the twigs and leaves at 

 the end of the branch, and then platted into each other 

 to form a stalk, or neck, several inches in length. As 

 this progresses it is gradually expanded in the form 

 of an inverted wine-glass, or a bell, till it is large 



