Philetairus socius
Drawn from open occurrence records inside Etosha National Park, aggregated onto a 10 km grid.
Occurrence records measure where people looked and found something, which is not the same as where the animal is. This is a relative likelihood, not a probability.
Records exist for January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December. A quiet month can mean the animal was absent, or that nobody was looking.
A sparrow-sized bird that builds the biggest nest of any bird on Earth. Sociable weavers raise haystack cities in camelthorn trees and on telephone poles, structures of grass that can house a hundred pairs, weigh tons, and stay in continuous use for generations; some colonies are believed to be over a century old. Inside, the chambers are engineered climate: cool against the Kalahari afternoon, warm through freezing desert nights. The colony is also a housing market with tenants, since pygmy falcons live in the nest permanently, part lodger, part security. The birds themselves, small, scaled, endlessly chattering, are easy to overlook under the architecture, which is precisely the wrong way around.
Everything is communal: building, maintenance, mobbing snakes, even feeding chicks that are not your own. Cape cobras raiding chambers are the colony's recurring nightmare.
Shoot the nest as a landscape first, low sun raking the thatch, then wait beneath the entrances with a long lens for commuting birds. Late afternoon has the busiest traffic.
Never touch or shake a nest structure, and keep drones away; a panic flush can collapse chambers and cook eggs in the sun.