The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think

by Jennifer Ackerman

To attract females, males build bowers, ornate structures made of sticks and decorated with ornamental objects. These are not nests; no raising of young takes place here. Rather they are theaters for seduction, the stage a male bowerbird uses as a backdrop for his song and dance to woo visiting females. Of the nineteen species of bowerbirds, fifteen build bowers, each favoring a different structure and different sorts of decorations, each remarkable in its own way. Macgregor’s bowerbirds build a maypole spire of twigs and sticks up to three feet high and circled with moss and piles of insects, nuts, and fruit. Male satin bowerbirds collect blue objects and paint the interior of their bowers, chewing up dried hoop pine needles and applying the resulting brown paste to the inside of their bower walls. Only humans and a few other animals create more lavishly decorated structures.