Weaverbirds sew grass into nests and flash seasonal reds and yellows
Ploceidae are small passerines—weavers, bishops, and kin—named for intricately woven vegetation nests. Carl Jakob Sundevall coined the family (as Ploceïdes) in 1836. Phylogenetics place them sister to Viduidae and Estrildidae, splitting about 18 million years ago in the middle Miocene.
Ploceidae is a family of small perching birds whose common names, weavers, weaverbirds, weaver finches and bishops, all point to the same talent: building nests of intricately woven plant material. The Swedish zoologist Carl Jakob Sundevall set up the family, spelled Ploceides, in 1836. Modern classifications trim out some birds once lumped in, such as certain sparrows, while adding the single-species subfamily Amblyospizinae. The family now holds 16 genera and 122 species.
All are Old World birds. Most live in Africa south of the Sahara, a few in tropical Asia, and some have been introduced elsewhere. Genetic studies put their closest relatives in a group formed by the indigobirds and whydahs (Viduidae) and the waxbills (Estrildidae), with the shared ancestor living in the middle Miocene about 18 million years ago. Work by Thilina de Silva and colleagues in 2017, expanded in 2019, showed that the big genus Ploceus, as currently drawn, does not form a single natural lineage.
Males of many species wear bright red or yellow with black, and in some the colours appear only during breeding. All have rounded, conical bills suited to eating seeds. That diet has a downside for farmers: the red-billed quelea, said to be the most numerous bird on Earth, can damage crops.
Nests differ by species in size, shape, materials and technique. Many are finely woven from thin strips of leaf fibre, grass and twigs, and most have narrow entrances that face downward. Buffalo-weavers instead pile up huge, messy stick nests, sometimes with woven spheres inside. The sociable weavers of Africa build communal structures where 100 to 300 pairs each keep a separate flask-shaped chamber reached by a tube from below, and sparrow weavers raise young cooperatively in family groups. Many species breed in colonies, often near water, crowding several nests onto one branch for safety. Typically the male does the weaving and uses the finished nest to win a mate.
Source: Ploceidae
