Weaver Birds

One of the joys of returning to Tanzania in 2010, after being away for almost fifty years, was to renew my acquaintance with weaver birds, so-called because they build their nests by....

....weaving lengths of grass into round nests which are suspended beneath branches, the purpose of this being to make it as difficult as possible for snakes to prey on their eggs and young.

I don't remember many birds from my childhood - or, if I do remember them, I've long forgotten their names, but I could never forget the weavers. 

They came to the gardens of the four houses we had in Mombasa because we always had a bird bath. Even in the UK, one is urged to have a bird bath, not just for the birds to drink from but also because having a bath is an important part of a bird's health regime

I particularly remember weavers visiting the garden of the last house we had in Mombasa, where we had a concrete bird bath in the middle of the lawn. This our 'garden boy', Mlalo, would clean late every afternoon in time for the weavers to arrive, which they usually did around the time we were sitting on our veranda enjoying our sundowners.

However, my strongest memories are of the weavers at....

....the Hoey house at Nyali, that lovely house which looked out across a lawn and through the palms to a beach, a lagoon, and the far-out white line of the breakers on the reef.

This was a bigger bath, set into the lawn, with some cobbles arranged artistically in it - it's just visible in the right-hand bottom corner of the photo, located immediately in front of the veranda where we sat for.... yes.... our sundowners.

Weavers, I have since learnt, come in almost forty different species, in Tanzania alone. The one I photographed on our 2010 visit is a Tanzanian masked weaver. I am amazed I didn't see other species during the couple of weeks we were there but, as I have said before, we were ill-prepared for the wonders of Tanzania's bird life.