28 May 2024 ANIMAL BUILDERS
Today, Jackie installed Animal Builders as a new category on my blog post page, specifically to contain this article explaining my interest in the subject, and compliment, and provide a link to, the new Animal Builders album. For many years, I have felt that the lack of a blue-chip documentary series about animal builders, has denied a global audience access to an abundance of fascinating information about a major aspect of natural history. One only has to think of beaver dams, bird nests and bowers, wasp nests, spider webs and egg sacs and the huge range of cocoons, mounds, burrows, dens and lairs created by animals. And the list only refers to terrestrial creatures.
I have trawled through my images and found plenty of material for the album. My focus for all the previous flora and fauna albums, had been on showing what a species looks like, hence the preponderance of close ups and zoom images. For the new album, the emphasis has shifted to using wider shots to best show a complete structure. Fortunately, when videoing an animal builder species, I included shots of the structure which they built, as best I could, although in the case of the fawn-footed melomys, which I have filmed on several occasions, I had no reason to think of it as an animal builder because it was a long way from its home in the rainforest canopy.
I knew that my material included the work of animal builders and that some of the examples are beyond belief. I felt there was sufficient material to create a new album devoted to the subject. I just love that aspect of natural history. Assembling the album has been an ineffable pleasure.
I have not researched the subject, nor do I intend to, but have delighted in seeing examples on my travels, particularly on safari in Botswana and Zambia, where I marvelled at the nests of weaver birds, spectacular termite mounds and a wild dog den. The den is often an abandoned aardvark or warthog hole, which the dogs revamp or repair. In China, in 2007, I was intrigued to see a golden orb spider aggregation, much like the ones I had seen on the mountain earlier that year and in the same season.
Some structures are made by solo builders, some are built collaboratively and some, as we have seen, are re-purposed. Tree hollows provide extra security for some bird species, in which to place their nest. They also provide nests for gliders, who line them with leaves, to which the greater glider adds strips of bark.
One expects birds to shine in the pantheon of animal builders. The mountain’s most spectacular instance is the bower of the male satin bowerbird. The superbly crafted nest of a willie wagtail, precariously perched on a horse hame in a large machinery shed, is the most adroit. Other nests are arguably as well built. The mound of the brush turkey is in a league of its own. Some of the nests are admittedly perfunctory.
It is hard to fathom how a caterpillar in the form of a case or bagmoth, can create such a variety of mobile homes. The album includes six examples. It is equally difficult to comprehend how a wasp, in the case of the potter or mud-dauber, can build a complex structure with brood cells and passages, that can last for years. Wasps are amazing builders. The nest of some species is a feat of engineering. There are five varieties in the album.
Spiders are brilliant builders, whether as web makers, particularly the net-casters, who dangle from a silk thread with their two hind legs, while the remaining six suspend a stunningly formed net to trap prey, or as earth movers, notably the trap door spider with its substantial burrow, which one species in the album, caps with a geometrically perfect circle of earth.
Several of the case moth mobile homes were filmed on the picket fence in Driscoll Lane, others were filmed at people’s houses, as were the potter wasp nest and two of the paper wasp nests. The other two paper wasp nests were filmed next to the road, one of them being rather out of the way. I filmed a bird nest in rainforest, in a building, on a window cill, in bush land, and the rest in gardens, which were the location for the bowerbird bowers and the turkey mounds. The spiders were either filmed by the road side or in rainforest at night, where I filmed the burrowing cricket and the glow worm snare line.
The oldest image in the album dates from 1999, within six months of me beginning the project, and the most recent, from February 2024.