Do weavers breed earlier every year? The best way to find out is for citizen scientists to submit many records to PHOWN annually, starting to watch weaver colonies from now. The winter solstice has hardly passed but many Cape Weavers in Cape Town are actively building nests. The 6 most recent PHOWN records include green nests and/or males building (see VM 2500 and successively increase the last digit in the web address by 1 to see the records). Look out for weaver colonies and start submitting records to PHOWN so that we can track early nesting effort!

To see a news brief about early nesting in 2011 see here.

POSTSCRIPT: On 30 June the first active breeding nests were found - a Southern Masked Weaver male mating with a female (VM 2507) and a Cape Weaver feeding small chicks at Marina da Gama (VM 2509) - the latter probably laid eggs in early June.