You get to a point in the courtship where the female, now right we had calls, she came in from
a distance,
he brought her down to the perch, she’s looked at him,
she’s seen his maybe shape shift or maybe dance.
She’s still there.
What are the final phases of attraction?
What are the things that males and females are doing, in the end, to sort of seal the deal?
If the female’s interested in mating then there’s one final phase out of the whole
series of things that happen.
Almost every species has some series of specialized behaviors that happen as pre-mating behaviors.
And sometimes they’re pre-mating displays, you might even think of them as pre-mating dances.
But they happen in very close proximity to the female and a lot of them involve components
of touch.
This might happen with special feathers that the male is moving back and forth across
the female’s body in someway,
like the wires of a Twelve-wired or the wires on the tail of a Paradiseus are also rubbed
on the female when she’s in close and inspecting.
Usually right before mating there’s something even closer where the male is pecking at the
nape of the female in some ritualized way,
sometimes showing off his colors on the inside of his mouth.
And sometimes there’s a clapping or other kind of motion with the wings as the male
gets closer and closer and starts
touching her body with his body.
And then if everything is successful that’s when it all ends and you actually have mating.
That’s what all that other behavior has been about.
That whole period of deep scrutiny and evaluation by females, it happens at several levels.
There’s pretty serious scrutiny that can still happen from a little bit further away.
The male is doing parts of his display and she can still keep her distance.
But then there's this close scrutiny when the females get in really close and you can sometimes
actually see what it looks like, the process of selection happening.
You see a female turning her head and looking at something very specific.
In some cases they’ll even peck or probe at the male with their own bills.
There’s a whole complex series of motions and things that the males are doing and the
females are moving in and inspecting them.
And the males that are responding appropriately at that point in time and not overeagerly
turning around and trying to jump
on the female before she’s made her choice, those are the males that are going to be more
successful.
And I think that’s probably why you see so many of these behaviors where the male
is essentially in such a strange
compromising position with his feathers in weird places or holding some weird pose or
hanging upside down while the
female is evaluating them, because it gives her a lot of opportunity to respond to his
either appropriate or
inappropriate, as the case might be, behavior back towards her.
So, this kind of end game that the birds do with each other including the sort of strike
a pose inspection.
Do you see this in other birds?
There’s good reason to have close inspection before you decide who you’re going to mate with.
You’re looking for signs of disease or parasites.
A lot of the things that we would think about for ourselves before we wanted to get to close
to somebody are the same
kinds of things that are going on certainly broadly in the bird world.
It’s just in the Birds-of-Paradise we have such ritualized displays and such strong selection
for females to spend time
evaluating males for those different traits and behaviors and displays,
that this period of close inspection is sort of drawn out and has become elaborate in and of itself.
Females are calling the shots.
And the females are calling the shots on a day-to-day, minute-by-minute basis about where
this display is going to go and if it’s going to end up with mating.
But, more importantly they’re calling the evolutionary shots.
Meaning, thousands of generations of female preferences past have basically determined
that whole course of events that we’re seeing there.
Everything that male’s doing, every bit about the way he looks,
and also all those behaviors that the females are doing while they’re making their choice.
This is all the result of the driver’s seat that females have in Bird-of-Paradise evolution.