Sociable Weaver in Skeleton Coast

Philetairus socius

Chance of an encounter
Rare

Drawn from open occurrence records in and around Skeleton Coast, aggregated onto a 10 km grid. A cell is matched by its centre, which can sit up to 16 km outside the boundary, so this covers the surrounding country too.

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.

The evidence here

Grid cells
1
Records
3
Cell size
10 km
Years covered
2006 to 2019

A grid cell is a square of the map, not a sighting: 1 square of 10 km carry records for Sociable Weaver in and around Skeleton Coast, and the 3 records behind them were collected by other people and published openly. Nothing here counts animals, and a place with more records is not always a place with more animals.

About the Sociable Weaver

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.

The full field guide entry, and everywhere else it is recorded

Before you go

Never touch or shake a nest structure, and keep drones away; a panic flush can collapse chambers and cook eggs in the sun.