Science News | See how a male Victoria’s riflebird courts a female | Science News @ScienceNewsMag | Uploaded October 2024 | Updated October 2024, 5 hours ago.
A sit-and-wait flirter, a male riflebird (left in the first clip) puts on a high-energy — and noisy — show for a female visiting his perch. The most flexible wrist joints yet measured in a bird let him curve his dark wings like a flaring cape. Opening and closing his beak, as seen in the first slow motion clip, adds flashes of gold from the mouth and throat lining. Between flashes, he closes his beak to scrape it over the spread feathers for the show’s thwackity-thwack soundtrack, as seen in the second slow motion clip. Scientists previously thought the birds somehow clapped their wings together to make the sounds.
Video: Thomas MacGillavry and Joris De Raedt
A sit-and-wait flirter, a male riflebird (left in the first clip) puts on a high-energy — and noisy — show for a female visiting his perch. The most flexible wrist joints yet measured in a bird let him curve his dark wings like a flaring cape. Opening and closing his beak, as seen in the first slow motion clip, adds flashes of gold from the mouth and throat lining. Between flashes, he closes his beak to scrape it over the spread feathers for the show’s thwackity-thwack soundtrack, as seen in the second slow motion clip. Scientists previously thought the birds somehow clapped their wings together to make the sounds.
Video: Thomas MacGillavry and Joris De Raedt
