no camera

The camera seems to have been stolen from my front yard.

BUT HEY, BEFORE YOU GET TOO EXCITED ABOUT THE ABOVE AND BELOW...

This past weekend 

• I found and ordered the camera below on Saturday,
•  got confirmation that it was in the mail on Monday morning.... and on Monday afternoon, of course, I found the 'old' camera, which was where I apparently left it...

 An so this afternoon, Tuesday, I have been assembling a movie from the contents of the card in the camera found. Which movie posted shortly. And the camera is out ready for action in the morning. Here we are in mid-winter and there is still squawking activity at the bower every day. Nights close to zero celsius.

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I have (I wrote Saturday) ordered as replacement this camera, which has the security virtue that it cannot be used without the remote control, which I will keep in the house. I may also cut a window in a cashbox and lock the camera in the cashbox, fixing the cashbox to the chair with a padlock. Not losing the portability of the chair.

There will be a gap in the story. This type of camera with a remote controller is not available in Australia so it will be several weeks coming from China.

Challengers

Video below

It is now June, winter here in southeastern Australia, but the weather for the most part gentle, mild and sunny.

On 10 June the camera recorded some interesting behaviour worth posting here.

Odimbar the dark adult male sought to practise courtship with a green female bird. But through three of four three minute clips the two courtship desiring birds are subject to interference from green birds which I assume younger males. This is different from behaviour previously observed (in my limited bowerbird watching experience of less than three months) and I am led towards speculation that because we are heading for spring in less than three months when courtship will be serious there are younger birds challenging. I know of challenges among mature black bowerbirds. Does this movie reveal challenges from a bird or birds that would be pleased to take over and change plumage soon?

Well short of such speculation, you have to feel some sympathy for this couple trying to get time together.

There is mention in the literature from the Borgia group (see right column) of the way the aggressive sounds of the male satin bowerbird are very close to the courtship sounds, and that females can be unnerved by male performance. Well, here we see the multitasking male, holding a bottle top and a leaf in his mouth and trying to sing romance and 'buzz-off' at the same time, while dancing. Both male and female look at times frazzled by their situation... but wait for the fourth three minute clip.

I wrote in para three "practise courtship."  This does seem what is happening. It is not possible to know how many females may attend like this, but there seems to be 'practice' occurring, through this non-breeding season. Something collaborative, not just fly-by. The literature speaks of bowerbirds as practising polygyny, a precise term for that kind of polygamy in which the male has multiple partners, the female does not. Perhaps the one-partner conduct of females is clear with rings on legs of green birds; it's not otherwise easy to know. We have in earlier videos in these weeks seen a green bird in the bower practising being grown up for more than twenty minutes, we have also seen a female bird or birds in attendance off-season. We have also seen (but not filmed) green dance for green and black dance for black. There is nothing so simple as things less well studied.

I moved the camera again for better close-up view.

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.

a remarkable afternoon

I hope you stay to the end of the movie. Even if you don't like subtitles.

I finally got the camera in the right place and the camera filled the 16gb SD card in about an hour and a half. Please don't say "get a bigger card." It has taken me enough time to inspect and assemble the first 24 minutes of recording!

The camera had been recording 60 seconds and then ten second interval before checking for movement. Now it's set to record for 3 minutes then 10 second interval; more coherence to the story.

I have not enhanced or cropped film in any way this time. Straight as from the camera.

This time no voice-over. The birds, who are entirely in charge of the performance, can be heard without interruption.

This is not a cartoon with fast action. It's a record of life. If your life is too short to watch it all, consider skipping forward to places where I've put subtitle notes and be sure to see the end, aware of the amount of time and patience, imagination, energy and song and dance Odimbar has put into his performance for a whole half hour!

At points there seem to be real expressions of emotion.

You can enlarge by clicking on the square device in the bottom right of the film.

You can use a device in the same corner to get back to the whole page. 

bower demolished and rebuilt...

... or did I imagine it?

On Monday 24, after walking the dog, I decided I should get pictures from the field camera, which I'd forgotten to do at night. So I brought the SD card in at about 9am and was delayed putting the back till about 10... when I discovered that in the intervening period the bower had been smashed. This happens, male birds are rivals, they steal from each other, they fight over territory. But it was a great shock to discover. How was the bird... did this blog thus end??

I put the card in the camera and moved it to a new position.. which [sigh] was plainly not a good position because it failed to record, sun in its eye, the beginning of reconstruction of the bower.

SO, the movie for the day begins with a photo of the bower as was before destroyed, next as it was by lunchtime when the movement-sensing camera succeeded in recording. I did not know that when I moved the camera to a better location a little later. There follow 13 minutes of clips after 4pm, with more building and interaction with other birds. At the moment the camera is set to record 60 seconds with 20 second gaps before sensing for movement again. I will review this, consider longer periods of recording in a day or so.

I have placed some more links under 'research' in the right column, below the map. I am still in search of evidence that others have studied the complex relations between young and old and between genders, determinate or otherwise, over time, not just at sexy springtime... I said "determnate or otherwise" because if we know that in Homo sapiens there are more intersex people than redheads, perhaps we should leave that door open in seeking to understand bird behaviour too. And we are seeing complex interactions.

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Here first is a little infrared movie recorded just after dark. This is the creature who drives Ralph the Spoodle insane, yelling and yelling when it goes near the hens. Something must be done!

and this is the main movie of the day...

24 April: first film with fixed camera

[second movie added 25 April]

I set the camera up facing the bower at about 4.30pm on 22 April and got the SD card out of it this morning at about 9am, having forgotten to do that in the night.

Downloaded 27gb of movie at about 250mb a minute, camera recording for 60 seconds when some creature moves, 20 second gap or until activated again. It has taken me much of the day to produce this little movie of 12 minutes. :-)

After an hour I went out to reinstall the camera card and was alarmed to see the bower smashed to scattered sticks. So set about making a movie thinking this would be the last. But by the middle of the day Odimbar had built it again. And at 4.30pm 24 April his singing is coming in the window.

So this is just a bit of what I already have downloaded: from 4.30pm 22 April tojust after 8am next day. You can see the time in the lower right corner of the film.

A reminder that this is autumn here and as everyone knows, male Satin Bowerbirds build their bowers, in which to court women, in SPRING. We wait to see what happens in winter. And we speculate on roles: clearly some juvenile(s) of female(s) work on the bower too. Time to review gender roles among bowerbirds too?

and for the rest of the day

23 April 2017 - day 10

The counting of days from 1 to 10 arose from our days of observation. But becomes irrelevant. The bower is perhaps 20 days old and from this point we simply have regard for the date.

We are in a temperate climate, south of Sydney Australia, near the coast. Autumn weather at the moment, days persistently balmy with temperatures 14 to 23 celsius with occasional excursions above of below.

If the bowerbird is building because it's mistaken the season we should know by next month.

We now have a camera in place in the garden which begins to film when there is movement. Put in place, attached to an old chair frame, end of yesterday, 22 April. We can lift the chair away at the end of the day today (without fumbling about with the camera near the bower). If you don't hear from me again it will be because I'm drowning in hours of recording!

This is the setup: bower on the right, camera on the chairback on the left, adjacent to the water bowl.

Bower to right, on the left the water bowl on concrete block, dark green boxy camera on back of steel chair.

and here is the handheld movie from 22 April, from the bedroom window from which the photos above are also taken.

Day 7

Day 6 was overcast, uncertain weather. The were bird calls all round the house. But I saw no action at the bower. This perhaps because I stayed in the dark dealing with migraine and meniere's attack. And writing, elsewhere, about Korea, in some fury.

But I was also reviewing whether this curiosity of a bower with a cast of many in autumn might be an anomaly caused by the weather. It has been for the most part, balmy weather for the last week or so, overnight around 14c, daytime 23-25c. This in contrast to the end of February and early March which was dark and squally, if not as cool as now. So dark our hens stopped laying. (I have another explanation for that: we moved their accommodation.) But it is important to keep that explanation open.

But not today! I was entirely caught up, with two others, working in the garden, so no movie. But there was great activity around the bower. So questions remain open:

• Is the weather falsely suggesting it is spring... in which case what follows?
• Is Odimbar going to maintain his performance for months... is there any normality to such?
• Who is the Yuthiwim? I do not want to anthropomorphise or relate to any human culture, but there is a bird in the plot with a special relationship. I believe that after this week I can say it is one bird not a string of different birds. I believe, from plumage and behaviour, that this bird is not part of the juvenile pack. Is Odimbar her child? Is Odimbar older than we thought? Is this a bird from another spring time? Is there other observed history of such a female role? 
• Will we keep seeing The Pretender perform? Is this a prelude to challenge? Or will he be driven off to find his own territory? And... why is he doing this? What prompts a bowerbird to perform? Does... speculative question... the sight of the bower and the opportunity to perform prompt a bird of a certain disposition and a certain stage of development to get in there... and does the performance lead on to further biological change and development of adult male feathering?
• We know that the adult male satin bowerbird not only has to maintain his bower but also must patrol and secure his whole territory. Will there be challenge from any other mature bowerbird? In what form? 
• A person left a blue bottle top on my letterbox, seen early today. Later it was gone, perhaps to Odimbar's bower, perhaps elsewhere (to the postman?). Certainly early this morning I saw a green bird steal a blue bottletop from Odimbar's collection. For whose bower, where?

I have just read Graeme Chapman's observations against which I need to check my own,

In suitable habitat bowers may average five per sq. km. and be spaced roughly 300 metres apart, so each male is well within earshot of his neighbours. In each territory, there is usually a number of green birds, either females (black bills) or subordinate males (pale bills) that may try to establish rudimentary bowers; these subordinate males don't acquire blue adult plumage until their fifth or sixth year. The main bower in a territory is maintained by a single blue male. That is where he courts and finally mates with his females (he mates with several) and it is the centrepiece of the territory. There is fierce competition at these bowers - neighbouring males will attempt to destroy the bower and pinch the sticks or ornaments, taking them to their own bowers and young males also come to try to display and steal things as well. Usually a new bower is constructed each year, close to the previous one - the site is traditional - it may be used by a succession of different owners. Decorations are mainly blue, violet, purple or greenish yellow. The blue tail feathers of Crimson Rosellas are a favourite in the wild, but near habitation all sorts of plastic objects are collected. At one stage near Sydney birds were removing the blue plastic rings off the top of milk bottles and getting their heads stuck in the ring, so the makers kindly changed the colour of the ring - end of problem.

Day 5

This morning a flurry of green birds, Teehoops, came in just after 7 and in response from stage left (as I look upon it), entered Odimbar. His presence fairly quickly saw them off today. There remained Eastern Spinebills, a Black and White Flycatcher, wrens and wattlebirds, but no interaction between these and the bowerbird.

"I'm only barely tolerating you, you at the window."

Then, as I sat and watched and felt a little guilty about a rude movie I'd made yesterday in which I sarcastically suggested he was a thumb-twiddling male, he set to work. He came and went with fine new straws and proceeded to fit them into his bower. I was hurrying to go out. No video.

When I came back near 11, the bird in the photo was in charge of the scene. But despite my wearing nondescript dark colours and arriving quietly at my window, he/she saw me in in an instant and flew to the left and into the big magnolia.

Then, a bit later, to my far left, events in the movie below. Open to interpretation. This is my interpetation: I at first thought he, Odimbar, was trying to drive off a bird, but I shifted to think this is Yuthiwin, the bird also in the still shot above. They are having fun, or one of them at least is having fun. She acts like all this is her territory. Perhaps it has been her territory from before Odimbar became dominant male of the bower. We did not see the beginnings of the bower, I don't know if people get to see that beginning. What is the role of the Yuthiwin in that beginning? Who makes the start, who prepares the dance space? ... Another question: we have assumed that Odimbar is newly adult-fledged, this being a new bower. Or other interpretation possible?

The photo above is a little to the right of centre in window view. The movie is to the extreme left of my window view. In between is the 10 metre high bulky dark mass of the Port Wine Magnolia with its many roosting and nesting birds. The Yuthiwin lives there.

The movies of day 4

The Pretender:

Today there was a very beautiful green-brown bird of alpha male proportions (who we shall call the Pretender) who acted for a while, in Odimbar's absence, as if the bower was his, with an audience if Teehoops (teenage hooligan peers), perhaps also females but no evidently charmed individual.

Which brings into my mind as mentioned earlier the question of the biological and the psychosocial triggers for conversion to satin black bird status. When Odimbar flew back, with a new blue bottle top, the Teehoops and the Pretender*** jump away but demonstrate that they would have the crown if they could. With about 30 seconds of reading instructions I've brightened the video and provided voice-over using iMovie.  Note added two days later: there is a bird in the bower while The Pretender does his dance. I refer to this as a juvenile in the voice-over. But I think that bird is not a juvenile but the Yuthiwim, going about her housekeeping. 

*** I am using the word Pretender in the everyday sense but also in the sense of he who claims a title not his (or her, but most of the human pretenders are male. Wikipedia offers a list of current pretenders in our own species.

Yuthiwin: "You'd think I was 'is Mother!"
All the world knows that male satin bowerbirds are super cleverpants at building super-colossal bowers. But what if someone else does the hard work?

and a little extra on roles