Weavers | Ploceidae

Wevers | Tejedores

Small to medium seed-eaters with a short, heavy conical bill and strong feet, which do not pile their nests up but knot them. The male starts with a ring: he tears a narrow strip from a grass, reed or palm leaf, loops it round a stem or thin branch and pulls the end through with his bill; from that ring he works forward and back until a closed globe stands there, the entrance at the bottom and in a number of species a spout of tens of centimetres below it. Bill and foot serve as the loom, and the work takes two or three days; the female does not build but inspects and lines the inside, and if she rejects it the nest is pulled apart and begun again. Not every member of the family weaves: the buffalo weavers heap a mass of thorny sticks around the crown of a baobab or a pole, and the sociable weaver builds, with many pairs together, a single permanent grass haystack that can weigh hundreds of kilos under a tree crown or a pylon, with dozens of separate entrance tunnels underneath in which the colony also roosts outside the breeding season. In the bishops and widowbirds of the genus Euplectes the male moults in the rains into a short-lived black plumage marked with red, yellow or orange, with the back and rump feathers raised or with greatly elongated tail feathers, and afterwards falls back into a streaked sparrow-coloured dress barely separable from the female. The family breeds in colonies, from a few nests in a thorn tree to breeding grounds of millions of pairs in reed or thorn scrub; the colonies draw raptors, snakes and the diederik cuckoo, which lays its egg with a whole series of species in this family.