[Illustration with caption: GREAT HANGING NESTS OF THE CRESTED
CACIQUE As seen in the delta of the Orinoco Rover, Venezuela.]

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 raffia 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 Baltimore 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 intelligence among birds. It is
the community house of the little sociable weaver-bird of South
Africa (_Philetoerus 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,