Answer: Sociable Weavers

If sociable weavers had a human analog, they’d be the architects and construction crews that build high-rise apartment buildings capable of housing thousands of people. Sociable weavers are small African birds roughly the size of the common sparrow and with similar coloration. Despite their diminutive size, they pool their energy and resources into building enormous multi-family and multi-generational nests.

Colonies as large as 500 or more sociable weavers work together to construct nests that typically weigh more than 2,000 pounds and can easily exceed the size of a small bus. It’s not uncommon to see a tree bent under the weight of their nests and not unheard of for their prolific building to outright buckle or snap the tree they’ve selected as a host platform. The nests can have upwards of 100 discrete chambers, which makes the sociable weaver “hives” one of the largest continuous vertebrate structures in the animal kingdom.