Fabric

Beyond the sum of parts

            Many birds build nests in which to lay and incubate eggs, but the artfulness of what they build varies enormously across the species, ranging from a crude pile of sticks or a concavity in the sand, to beautifully woven, enveloping enclosures, all with the goal of forming something they can lay their eggs in, and keep them toasty with their body heat.  My featured Found Object is the nest of a weaverbird from southern Africa.  

            The name “weaverbird” nest suggests “fabric”, and conjures up a lot of both tangible and intangible things, from sheets or layers of material composed of filaments, strands, threads, or fibers, to complex social relationships. While we may enjoy the conceit that humans invented fabrics, a variety of animals, including weaverbirds, have been making them for millions of years. 

Across the enormous variation of the “sophistication” with which birds build nests, the many species of weaver birds in southern Africa are near the top of this intellectual avian hierarchy.  To an American, these nests immediately draw attention.  I eyed many a weaver bird nest, mostly out of reach, before I found one whose moorings in a palm had given way so that it had fallen to the ground, no longer any use to the owner-bird.  The failed mooring suggested that this bird was a bit careless about building on “firm foundations”, but I was grateful because now I had a nest I could collect and keep. 

A weaverbird nest from South Africa. The nest is constructed of grass blades interwoven into a fabric-like structure.

            The nest is clearly made of fabric, but are birds actually weaving, knitting, crocheting, or felting?  A closer look at the detail of weaverbird nest (below) reveals that the craft they practice is somewhere between weaving and knitting, and seems rather confusing if you think in human terms.  The birds clearly understand the importance of intertwining strands and wrapping them around one another to make them stay in place, but the result is neither quite weaving with its perpendicular warp and woof, nor knitting with serial and continual purled and knitted incomplete loops, nor crocheting with its completed knotted loops.  There is some resemblance to knots, and indeed, the nests incorporate some overhand knots, but the absence of systematic serial looping fails to qualify as knitting or crocheting. But no matter, the outcome is a fabric capable of containing the birds and their offspring, a fabric of interlacing and interlocking grass strands that bonds a breeding pair and holds the family together and safe, but also creates the intangible social fabric that binds the young family together.  Both the material and intangible fabric may be messy and ephemeral by human standards but just fine for avian purposes.

Detail of a weaverbird nest showing the intricate intertwining of grass blades.

            When weaverbirds aggregate many nests close together, they create a second layer of social fabric, multiple families bonded by their mutual (perhaps protective) interest. The artful nests of the vitelline masked weaver occupies long stretches of the reeds on the shore of the Kunene River, the boundary between Namibia and Angola.  Like homeowners in a neighborhood with front lawns and back yards, the openings of the nests all face the same way.  Perhaps there is a homeowner’s association that enforces such rules, and if there is, it is a kind of intangible weaving or knitting bonding the community together, the bonds of shared wisdom passed among the birds.

A colony of the nests of the vitelline masked weaver on the banks of the Kunene River on the border between Namibia and Angola.

In addition to the vitelline weaver, many species of weaverbirds nest in communities, no doubt benefiting by joining together.  The colony below probably gained protection from predators especially when the pond level was high. Such colonies probably exist for a long time as breeding pairs are replaced by others when their time is upon them, much like a suburban neighborhood turns over as families grow, move away or die.  Suburban houses, of course, are sold and reused, but whether this is also true of the nests in the picture below is unknown (at least to me).

A colony of weaverbirds (species unknown) in southern Africa.

            In the sociable weaver birds of Namibia, the birds have done away with clustering nests in neighborhoods and simply build a gigantic communal nest, the avian equivalent of an apartment building, a sort of condo in the desert.  Breeding pairs have their own entrance, mostly directed downward.  Launching must be easy, but reentry a bit more tricky. Other creatures, including snakes also make their homes in these colossal nests. 

The nests can be so large that they sometimes break the tree that supports them, dumping a ton of hay on the ground.  The birds then establish a flurrying, two-way stream of fluttering of birds busily carrying grasses upward as they salvage the pile on the ground to rebuild their nest in the tree.  Whether there are avian structural engineers to assess the tree’s strength for supporting the nest is an open question. There is a clear need for one, much as there was in Florida’s condo collapse.

The communal nest of sociable weaverbirds in the Namib Desert of Namibia. The nest is residence to probably hundreds of birds, but also other animals that exploit the nest.

            In addition to moving from suburban neighborhoods to apartments, sociable weaver birds have also given up knotting and weaving. Instead, they construct what looks like a giant haystack composed of stiff grass stems poked into an interlocking mass.  Perhaps Namib Desert grasses are less suited for weaving or knotting because they are stiffer.  The brief growing season in the desert also means that for most of the year, stiff, dry grass is all that is available.  

A view looking up into the individual nest openings of the of the sociable weaverbird communal nest.

            As a final, remarkable example of bird-made fabric (and my last Found Object), the Cape Pendulous Tit of the Kalahari Desert makes a felt nest entirely out of spider webs. It may not roll, crush, squeeze, stretch or pound the spider silk into felt, but the natural tangle and stickiness of the spider silk forms a fabric that easily qualifies as a felt.  Imagine the number of spider webs the bird must collect to build this felt nest, a soft, warm, enveloping pocket in which to raise baby birds.  Do the birds eat the spiders whose webs they collect?  It would seem sensible.

A nest made entirely of spider webs by the Cape Pendulous Tit of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana.

Fabric is much more than something material, and its many properties and internal relationships have many parallels in the human consciousness, in society, and in language.  Fabric metaphors abound--- our social fabric consists of the interlaced myriad threads of individual lives.   We spin yarns that have no material existence, we follow threads that are not fibers but intangible links of ideas.  When a claim is completely divorced from reality, it is made of whole cloth.  It is not just fabric that can be tightly woven, but intangible stories and plots, stories that weave together disparate threads that are not literally threads.  When your talents and mine are both necessary to a task, we are the warp and woof of an efficient team knitted together.  A confounding problem can have us tied in figurative knots, but a figurative knot is also what we tie voluntarily (mostly) in marriage.  Combining and joining filaments, fibers, and threads in multiple ways results in something very different than its component parts, a fabric of material and/or a fabric of relationships.