The Ark Files - Home Sweet Home

Just like humans, most animals need a place where they can feel safe from their enemies and where they can shelter from the weather and raise their young. In creating their homes, animals must become architects and designers, potters and plasterers, weavers, needle workers, miners, masons, scaffolders, thatchers and sculptors.

CHOOSING A DESIGN

Animals choose designs that suit their way of life and the building materials available to them. Some homes such as caves and hollow tree trunks require no construction and are ready for birds, bats and other creatures to move into straight away. Others such as tree houses where orangutans sleep are thrown together quickly because they are only needed for an overnight stop. More permanent homes such as bee hives and huge, air-conditioned termite galleries with a maze of interconnecting rooms and passageways are masterpieces of construction, built from scratch. Mobile, large animals and those that constantly move about often don't bother building a home at all, but others build lifetime shelters and hardly ever leave them.

OFF TO THE HARDWARE STORE

Nature provides all the building materials to produce a variety of award-winning designs. Some animals start by gnawing through large trees; others collect palm fronds, branches and leaves; many seek fur, feathers, grasses, seed pods and even snake skins to make their homes complete. Spider silk, plant resins saliva and mucus help provide the glue and stick tape to hold some completed homes together.

BEAVERING AWAY

North American beavers need a home where they will be safe from hunting animals such as bears, and where they can store food for the winter when the land is snowbound. They get both by building a dam. First they ram sticks upright into the stream. Then they use their large, continuously growing teeth to gnaw through small trees. They drag these to the site, lay them across the sticks, weigh them down with boulders and leaves, and then plaster everything together with mud. Then they build a 'lodge' on the shore beside the dam using sticks, poles, branches, reeds and mud. The lodge is safe because the only way into it is through a tunnel that opens underwater. (Did you know the beaver is the only rodent able to walk on its hind legs? This enables it to carry building materials in its mouth and front legs.)

SCUBA DIVERS

Have you ever heard of the water spider? He spends almost his entire life under water, spinning a bag of fine silk and attaching it to plants and to the bottom of his watery home with strong threads. He rises to the surface of the water once a day and traps a bubble of air between his back legs, swims down and releases the bubble inside the bag - his own miniature diving bell!

WEAVERS AND KNOTTERS

The clever African weaver bird builds its elaborate, beautifully constructed nest of tightly interwoven grass stalks at the end of a branch, often hanging over water. A long tube used as an entrance passage makes it hard for snakes or other predators to plunder the nest. Females inspect nests very critically and an inexperienced male who has built a clumsy-looking nest will not be able to attract a mate. Often massive communal homes are found where separate birds build individual nests all together under one roof, housing more than 100 birds.

INTERIOR DECORATORS

One of the most beautiful of nature's constructions is the dancing stage made by the bower bird. These bowers are decorated with bright, fresh objects such as shells, feathers, berries, flowers and bones. The male often makes a paintbrush from a piece of stringy bark that he pecks at to separate the fibres. He then mashes a berry and uses the juice to paint and glue the walls of his bower together.

ANIMAL ARCHITECTS

• Siamese fighting fish and paradise fish make floating homes out of special saliva bubbles in which they deposit their eggs.
• The fennec fox excavates a deep cave-like burrow occupied by up to 10 family members in hard packed sand dunes or cliff faces.
• A naked mole rat has one of the largest burrows of all with hundreds of individuals occupying a complex system of chambers and layers of tunnels more than one hundred metres long.
• Chimps take no more than a few minutes to build a tree home for the night and then move on again the next morning.
• Bee-eater birds use their beaks to drill tunnels up to a metre long into the face of a rock.
• Gopher tortoise holes - up to 12 metres long - have been made by several generations and are probably many centuries old.
• Zoo Staff are always careful to supply all the comforts of home to animals in their care. Have a look at the many ways they do this next time you visit the zoo.