dancing boys and girls plus destruction and rebuilding

OF COURSE, some of the most interesting things happen when the camera is not in place, as on a recent Saturday morning when we observed from our window a green bird dancing for a green bird five metres from the bower and then realised that at the bower a black mature bird was dancing for a black mature bird. Oh how modern is that!

I've not put anything here for several weeks, having been writing a journal article on Korean issues.

I've also been distracted by reading Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life, (2016) where he notes that pigeons, if given a task with one eye masked, do not know how to perform it when the mask is swapped to the other eye [p1048 of 3690, electronic version]. In other words, their eyes have separate brain systems. Moreover [p1070 of 3690] there are red and yellow portions of each eye's vision (in pigeons) that look to the front and the side... and the two different parts of one eye don't talk to each other.

It is evident from political debate and non-debate here that we may be as evolved as pigeons, though pigeons may demur.

But to get back to the naturally bird-brained... I have to wonder about bowerbird vision and the pattern of the dance being for the bird in the bower to see primarily with left eye. The speculation of the Borgia group at U Maryland is that this is an evolved dance hall pattern that saves the female from rape. But perhaps it involves something in their vision instead or as well.

BUT MERCIFULLY, OR ANYWAY we did catch two interesting three minute clips on 14 May, in which firstly, a mature male is seen yanking the bower apart... and then 20 minutes later, Odimbar is back and swiftly rebuilding, venting a bit of irritation on a hapless Wonga Pigeon just trying to feel good in the rain.

There is of course another possible explanation – that the one bird took down his structure to improve it... But then the destroyer also stole a bottletop.

Then at the end a very short clip after Odimbar has done his rebuild, in which he lets out a great yell to tell the world that this is his domain!

Green bowerbird afternoon

The all-singing, all-dancing Odimbar is not there all day, not always at his bower. He has to eat, perhaps he has to snooze, or schmooz somewhere.

This film is about something that happened on 7 May, in the afternoon, when Odimbar was absent.

It features a green bird. I have from early in this blog puzzled over the role of green birds, some female, some immature males. Comforting to know that until the last several decades everyone in Australia was puzzled about this and I think probably not all the puzzles have gone away.

This green bird spends more than 20 minutes alone, endeavouring to understand 'bower life' and 'learning' some of the bower life routine. I have left the 20 minutes intact (but it's made of 3 minute clips with brief breaks). I marvel at the bird's ability to persist in the task that long. Some may see him doing multiple here-and-there tasks. A matter of definition. I call the whole period a task, a great learning task associated with growing up. The blue-black adults skip from one action to another in the whole task of being adult bowerbirds at the bower. So does this green bird.

I have offered some comment as the movie proceeds. I note that contrary to many humans this bowerbird is able to keep his mind on what he's doing for 20 minutes without getting a snack from the kitchen. He does get a drink of water. We should all turn to water more often to hydrate.

Please enjoy. AND PLEASE WATCH TO THE END, YOU WILL BE REWARDED. The birds are in charge of the script, every time. I'm just astonished that they have such a sense of the importance of a good ending. Even the ending after you think you've already seen the ending...

I should add a note about production of this movie. For some reason iMovie (versions 9 and 10) allowed me for several weeks to make movies from the field camera with its output of files called .AVI . But then iMovie seems to have snapped out of it and realised what it had been allowing and stopped publishing media of AVI origin: dirty rotten old-fashioned Windows-related muck. Legacy stuff, cut it off at the kneecaps! Suffice to say I spent too many hours trying to get iMovie to continue to work before hunting an alternative, testing it in demo, then buying it: a product called Wondershare Filmora. I suppose I should sit back and say that for this older brain it's been more interesting than Sudoku. The challenge at age 73 was the choice between one year for USD49 or a lifetime for USD59. I've paid the extra for lifetime and will have to persist to make it worthwhile... :-) And also will have to live longer to develop more than pedestrian capacity to use it.

An afternoon of maintenance, practice and a rowdy visit. And bathing wrens.

I went to get a photo of the bower site and the adjacent trees, particular the smooth trunked Bleeding Hearts (Homolanthus populifolus), up which Odimbar can skip in half a second to sit in his observer post. See this when he's had a drink, second movie below. These elegant rainforest trees, named for their leaf appearance, arrive as seeds in bird droppings. That is the close observation post. 60 or70 metres away in a neighbour's backyard, he goes much higher to guard his territory.

In going to take a photo, with the iPad, I discovered two wrens having a bath. A low quality movie in low light, but you can make out the wrens having fun at the birdbath.

The very dense tree in the right is Michelia figo known as the Port Wine Magnolia.

The field camera absent while card is read, usually hangs on the back of the wire framed chair with wooden seat.

The bower is behind the left-leaning tree, which is a Hymenosporum flavum, 

known as a native frangipani in Australia, for its abundant creamy white flowers.

The shrubbery to the left, the backdrop to the bower contains camellia, azalea and currently in bright red orange flowers of Abutilon. Whose flowers he throws away if they fall in the bower., wrong colour.

This below is a bunch of film clips from several days ago, briefly after 2pm, then several after 4pm. A relatively quiet afternoon, though we have no record of what preceded it.

Odimbar calmly does some tidying up, then flies away. Then an immature male practices some things he'd like to do if he turns blue, I called this role the 'Pretender' before, it will still do. Then Odimbar defends his bower against a couple of green birds. Then he gets to show his style, to himself. I keep typing here my speculations about behaviour and maturation... and then erasing them. Time enough for that later.

Gerald Borgia's research on Satin Bowerbirds

I have discovered the page on the work of Gerald Borgia's lab at the University of Maryland, with its focus on issues in sexual selection in bowerbirds, as a model for understanding complex male display.

There is much to read, I have just begun. I will not be trying to summarise here. There are a number of interesting posters under Current Research.

There is information about volunteering as a field assistant to work in Australia—pay your own way there, get food and basic lodging, work quite hard, assess yourself for further study and ...  mind the snakes. The site appears to be in a remote mountain range area in northern New South Wales but I may be wrong. There is more than one 'Wallaby Creek' in NSW.

Also films and links to many research papers, which I've only begun to browse.