Birds of a Feather

I completely, 100% guarantee you, if you polled a thousand visitors about to go into a Bird House what bird they were most excited to see, not a single one would mention the Taveta golden weaver - or any weaver, for that matter.  I also guarantee you that, if you were to observe those visitors as they made their way through the building, that's the species that most of them would spend the longest watching.

People don't just go to the zoo to see animals.  They go to see animals doing something - monkeys swinging, seals swimming, bears wrestling.  Most birds, of course, can fly - but they do it for a reason, not for the fun of it.  A bird in an exhibit isn't going to fly endless loops around its aviary.  That's exhausting, energy-intensive, and, in the wild at least, a good way to drain yourself out and die.  As a result, many birds spend a lot of their time perching and preening, shaking it up a little now and then by preening and perching.  And occasionally pooping.  You can watch a harpy eagle (in the wild or in the zoo) for a considerable amount of time and get nothing for your trouble but a haughty glare.

When you see a harpy eagle in a zoo, however, you generally only see one, or a pair, unless there is an eaglet in the nest.  The same is true for whooping cranes, or southern ground hornbills, or cassowary, or a lot of other very impressive birds.  Weaverbirds may lack imposing gravitas, but when you get a lot of them and put them together, you can always count of their being some action.  Nests need to be built and maintained constantly.  Courtship is carried out.  Some birds will feed, while others will vigilantly scan the horizon for danger.  Minor feuds break out.  Songs are being sung (if you can call that a song).  Weavers may be tiny - but they're never boring.

The best exhibit birds, in many opinion, are the colonial ones, in which large numbers of a species can be housed together.  This includes not only small fry like the weavers, but some of the most popular of zoo birds, such as flamingos, penguins, and puffins.  Having lots of birds together not only guarantees action and excitement and cool behavior, but it also can do wonders for breeding programs.  An exhibit space which can accommodate a single pair of cranes can house two dozen flamingos.  With these species that love living cheek-to-beak, it only takes a few zoos to maintain a sustainable population of a species.

Of course, this only works for some species.  Some birds, such as swans and cranes, can be very sociable at some times of the year, and savagely territorial during others.  These are birds that can't be maintained in large flocks in zoos, because if you tried, there almost certainly will be blood.  Which is a pity - I've seen large flocks of both in the wild during migrations, and they really are magnificent to see.  It's just too bad that they dynamic wouldn't last.

Weavers will never be rock-star animals that the public comes out to droves to see, but I like to think that they are an animal that, once people discover, they're going to become entranced by.   Great things can come in tiny packages, and little birds can have outsized-behaviors.