An Animal Behavior Essay
Beauty, Brains, and Bowers:
one male bowerbird explains it all
By Eliot Azure
Every male in the animal kingdom knows that life is all about getting girls pregnant. Unfortunately, girls can be picky and most of the time you have to compete with other guys just to get their attention. For most male birds that means looking impressive, having a nice voice, and maybe knowing a few dance moves; but we bowerbirds have a much harder time. All the females I like expect me to be good at art, architecture, interior design, landscaping, singing, and dancing in addition to having striking good looks! You see, I have to build a structure of sticks, called a bower, for my mating display, and then I decorate it very carefully with specific ornaments that I find in my surroundings. Satin bowerbirds like me all build U-shaped walkways, known as avenues, for our bowers, which the females stand in while they watch their potential mate perform. There is a lot of pressure to get everything just right because the tiniest error can make her uncomfortable or even scare her away.
All of this construction, decoration, and display requires a lot of brain-power and practice to be done correctly. Therefore, when a female picks me to be her mate, she isn’t just enthralled by my good looks, she is agreeing that I have a brilliant mind - and hopefully the genes that will pass such cleverness on to our children. Surprisingly, humans only recently gave us male bowerbirds the credit we deserve for the amount of intelligence it takes to properly maintain a bower. They had the nerve to think that maybe bower decorating was instinctual and that getting laid didn’t have anything to do with being smart! Well, they finally put us to the test and we proved to them just how very bright we are.
Those meddling humans tested our problem-solving skills by placing some red objects on the ground in front of our avenue entrances and then making it difficult for us to remove them. These regions of ground are called the courts of our bowers and they are a very important part of our overall presentation. In fact, our courts make such a difference that my buddy Gus - a male great bowerbird who also makes avenues - actually arranges small rocks in his courts according to size and distance from the avenue entrance so that they create an optical illusion for the female as she stands inside his bower. It’s a very tricky thing to do and takes a lot of thought, but the extra effort is worth it to him. That’s how important these courts of ours are.
Anyway, the humans timed how long it took us to get the outrageously offensive red color out of sight and compared our times with how many ladies we were able to score that season. Only then were they willing to agree that bowerbird females care about more than instincts and health in their mates. As I’ve always said, it takes both beauty and brains to be truly sexy when you’re a male bowerbird.
Eliot Azure lives and works as a satin bowerbird in Wallaby Creek, NSW, Australia. Like every other male of his species, his favorite color is bright blue and his favorite activity is maintaining his own very attractive bower. He would invite you to stop by, but you might scare away the ladies.
(Image source: simon. Bits n Bobs. http://dailybitsnbobs.blogspot.com/2010/11/weekend.html. Retrieved 17 February, 2011.)
Endler, J., Endler, L., and Doerr, N. (2010). Great Bowerbirds Create Theaters with Forced Perspective When Seen by Their Audience. Current Biology, 20, 1679-1684.
Keagy, J., Sarvard, J., and Borgia, G. (2009). Male satin bowerbird problem-solving ability predicts mating success. Animal Behavior, 78, 809-817.