The bird leaned over, plucking a small bluish-black fruit from the tree and then holding it in its bill. Its red tongue seemed to roll along the outside of the fruit like it was testing the taste before swallowing it. Gulp and the fruit went down the gullet. Although this took a fraction of a second, it seemed slow motion in my mind. We’d been scanning this fig tree along the edge of Katini-Payamu National Park on the Cape York Peninsula. Our three-week trip only had a few more days.
A Fawn-breasted Bowerbird was working through the tree. Their last name comes from the males building a bower to attract the females. The family has 27 species. They occur in the forests of Australia and New Guinea.
The Bower
Bowerbirds clear an area of twigs and leaves and then construct their stage. Some build an avenue or domed tunnel of sticks just wide enough for the bird to walk through. Others make a maypole out of sticks. The structure crosses a dead horizontal branch and up saplings at both ends. The third type is a display court with large leaves laid upside down or tilted against rocks. They often decorate their bowers with particular items. The satin bowerbird uses blue items, the Fawn-breasted green fruit, and the Great Bowerbird small stones. These items are all laid out carefully in a pattern; if a person or another bowerbird moves one, the bower owner will put it back in its “correct” place.
Earlier, we had walked into a mangrove area near the end of Portland Road to look for a Fawn-breast. It flitted through the edge of the mangroves and the vegetation covering the sandy berm, but we never had a perfect look at it. We did find an old bower and then a new one.
The new bower was three feet long and 18 inches wide. The front half had a platform of short sticks, maybe two inches thick, and was covered with green fruit, each the size of an olive. The back half had vertical sticks rising straight up a foot or more, forming two walls and an avenue 18 inches long for the bird to walk through. The walls were several inches thick, each with hundreds of toothpick-thick branches. The avenue was only two inches wide but then seemed to open into a broader room that might give the bird a chance to turn around. More green fruit hung from the top of the avenue like Christmas ornaments.
The male will display on the stage, trying to convince a female to stop by. He wants to entice her to walk through his avenue. This is a critical first step in forming a pair bond and mating. Once they mate, she leaves to build a nest and raise young with no more help from him.
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#bowerbird #bower #fruiteating
