I like to think that, regardless of the other consequences of plastic litter, it does mean that female bowerbirds are living in an era of unparalleled male sexiness. Not sure that this is true though.
I like to think that, regardless of the other consequences of plastic litter, it does mean that female bowerbirds are living in an era of unparalleled male sexiness. Not sure that this is true though.
doctor bunjy, I am humbly requesting more information about the shiny blue bird who is threatening fingers, please doc
ohohoho those guys!
so satin bowerbirds are a largish perching bird native to australia, that has a REALLY BONKERS courtship practice, and also a mildly worrying obsession with the color blue.
see, this is a male satin bowerbird:
and this is a female satin bowerbird:
females raise their chicks alone, so an adult male bowerbird spends literally every free second of his day building and maintaining an elaborate structure called a bower!
this structure is made of carefully-arranged twigs, and MUST, read, MUST be festooned with as much blue garbage as bowerbirdily possible.
if a male bowerbird has enough trash to attract the eye of a female, she’ll come down for a closer inspection of his architectural prowess and sexy bottlecap collection:
if she decides that this particular male’s handiwork passes muster, she’ll let him hit it! and then she’ll retire to her regular normal bird nest somewhere nearby, where she’ll become a single mother of several bouncing baby chicks in the next month or two.
this endgame is VERY hard for males to achieve though, as female satin bowerbirds are probably the strictest critics in the entire animal kingdom! if a male satin bowerbird puts so much as a twig out of place, or if his sexy garbage pile isn’t quite the right shade of royal blue, he might not EVER get to mate.
forget Siskel and Ebert, if they sicced a couple of female bowerbirds on the movie industry, Hollywood would NEVER recover.
(in absence of colorful human garbage, male satin bowerbirds will seek out blue feathers, flowers, fruit, and rocks, and will beat the everloving shit out of each other over the limited supply of shiny stuff!)
Like all bowerbirds, the satin bowerbird shows highly complex courtship behaviour. Mate choice in satin bowerbirds has been studied in detail.[7] Males build specialised stick structures, called bowers, which they decorate with blue, yellow, and shiny objects, including berries, flowers, snail shells, and plastic items such as ballpoint pens, drinking straws and clothes pegs. As the males mature they use more blue objects than other colours. It is theorized that the preference for blue objects is due to the color accentuating the plumage of male satin bowerbirds or that the color blue is more familiar and the designated color for this species.[8] Females visit these and choose which male they will allow to mate with them. In addition to building their bowers, males carry out intense behavioural displays called dances to woo their mates, but these can be treated as threat displays by the females. Nestbuilding and incubation are carried out by the females alone.
Recent research has shown that female mate choice takes place in three stages:
- Visits to the bowers, before nests have been built, while the males are absent
- Visits to the bowers, before nests have been built, while the males are present and displaying
- Visits to a selection of the bowers, after nests have been built, leading to copulation with (typically) a single male.
Experimental manipulations of the ornaments around the bowers have shown that the choices of young females (those in their first or second year of breeding) are mainly influenced by the appearance of the bowers, and hence by the first stage of this process. Older females, which are less affected by the threatening aspect of the males’ displays, make their choices more on the basis of the males’ dancing displays. It has been hypothesised that as males mature their colour discrimination develops and they are able to select more blue objects for the bower. It is not yet known whether this description would also hold true for other species of bowerbird.
Male satin bowerbirds are known to destroy and steal from the bowers of one another.[9] The quality of a male’s own bower does not predict how often they will destroy others. However, males who exhibit more aggression by attacking others at feeding sites tend to destroy competitor bowers more frequently. [wikipedia]
He’s a 10 but the bower he constructed out of sticks and reeds isn’t decorated with any blue objects
painted some gay bowerbirds because I’m queer and I love bowerbirds (^:
[ID: Digitally painted illustration of two male bowerbirds snuggling in their nest on a forest floor. The birds have rich blue plumage and yellow beaks, and their nest resembles the mouth of a tunnel made of twigs and blue ribbons. Red and blue berries, yellow flowers, and blades of grass are scattered on the ground in front of them. A blue sky peeks through the treetops in the background.]
Satin bowerbirds are one of those species that even if you already knew they were really cool to begin with doing a deep dive on papers about them will blow your mind. For example just some tidbits off the top
- Mature male bowerbirds have such an insanely keen eye for spatial reasoning that they routinely use optical illusions and forced perspective to alter the appearance of their bower. Males that are better at this have better success in mating
- It takes about 7 years for male bowerbirds to mature and prior to their adult plumage coming in they look essentially identical to adult females. So sometimes groups of juvenile males will form little social flocks together as they mature and they’ll pretend to be females in order to steal nest decor from mature males. They grow up learning how to build their bowers with stolen trinkets and practicing their courtship dances with one another.
- Bowerbirds are probably the longest living passerine species (with one making it to 26 years old)
- Infection with blood parasites alters the iridescence of male bowerbirds’s feathers, and females may use this as a marker of suitability when choosing a mate
- Bowerbirds love flowers and specifically prefer rare species to more common ones
Seriously recommend that you type ‘Ptilonorhynchus violaceus’ into google scholar when you have some free time and just go ham learning about these weirdos