At some point, a tree becomes more nest than tree. That sounds like the kind of proverb that old guy at my local bar would tell me. Peter Chadwick/Getty
My father worked for over 30 years in construction, falling off of ladders and getting slivers of metal in his eye and generally bleeding profusely. He toiled like a maniac so our family could eat, all while furthering one of humanity’s most indispensable inventions: large-scale construction of shelter. From the most modest roof that my dad once nearly tumbled off of, to Dubai’s 2,716-foot Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, nothing builds like a human.
More absurd creatures:
For its size (and lack of opposable thumbs) though, Africa’s incredible social weaver surely comes close. These birds, about the size of the sparrows here in the States, come together in colonies of as many as 500 individuals to build by far the most enormous nests on Earth, at more than 2,000 pounds and 20 feet long by 13 feet wide by 7 feet thick. The structures are so big they can collapse the trees they’re built in, and so well-constructed they can last for a century, according to Gavin Leighton, a biologist at the University of Miami. Occupying as many as 100 chambers, these are quite possibly the biggest vertebrate societies centered around a single structure—outside of human beings and their skyscrapers, of course.
The social weaver with some building material. Or is that a tiny cigar. I can’t tell. Gavin Leighton
Calling the semi-arid plains of Namibia and South Africa its home, social weavers make use of several different materials, building the nest by weaving in twig after twig. Then they line the insides of the chambers with luxurious grass and feathers and, occasionally, cotton balls that Leighton accidentally drops in the field (perhaps it’s their keen sense of symbolic justice—he uses the cotton after drawing blood from the birds for genetic sampling).
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