Philetairus socius
Drawn from open occurrence records in and around Waterberg Plateau Park, 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.
Records exist for February, with the widest coverage in February. A quiet month can mean the animal was absent, or that nobody was looking.
A grid cell is a square of the map, not a sighting: 4 squares of 10 km carry records for Sociable Weaver in and around Waterberg Plateau Park, and the 40 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.
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.
Never touch or shake a nest structure, and keep drones away; a panic flush can collapse chambers and cook eggs in the sun.