Courtship

Joe Meche is vice president of the North Cascades Audubon Society and is in his 10th year as editor of the chapter newsletter. Joe is also a member of the board of directors of the Washington Brant Foundation. He has been photographing birds and landscapes for more than 30 years and has been watching birds for more than 50 years.

Birds are instinctively motivated to select mates and build nests to hold the eggs that will eventually hatch into the young of the year—the next generation of those amazing bundles of feathers and beauty that are found everywhere on the planet. While the process might seem simple enough on the surface, there’s a lot more involved in this chain of events. Birds of a feather do indeed flock together and, while there’s someone for everyone, the courtship rituals that take place in the avian world are almost as varied as the species themselves.

To communicate their intentions, birds often engage in impressive vocalizations to attract mates, while some species communicate with sounds. Woodpeckers drum on hollow trees to attract mates, and sometimes even resort to rapping on the gutters and chimneys of houses, much to the dismay of the human inhabitants. Ruffed grouse express their feelings with a drumming sound that is created by beating their wings rapidly against their breasts. Other birds rely on bill-clicking or the sound of the wind rushing through their wings in steep dives.

Along with their wonderful and varied songs and sounds, the males of many species rely on brilliant breeding plumage to attract the females. Displays of wing patterns are often an adjunct to their colorful finery, but the actual courtship behavior of many birds includes a mixed bag of repetitive physical movements. With everything from elaborate greetings to outright territorial displays that serve the dual purpose of repelling other males, a great deal of preliminary action occurs before the nesting ever begins. Call it foreplay, if you will.

The large family of ducks performs a wide variety of displays to attract their mates. Experts agree that this complexity of displays comes from the fact that breeding ducks tend to concentrate in smaller areas; therefore, each species has been forced to customize their own displays to minimize hybridization among the different species that might occupy the same breeding areas.

Studies of long-tailed ducks have shown that this particular species performs at least a dozen distinct displays during courtship. The males perform bill tossing, wing-flapping, bill-dipping, neck-stretching and porpoising while the females engage in chin-lifting, hunching and other actions before and after copulation.

Other ducks that engage in elaborate courtship antics include Barrow’s and common goldeneyes, ruddy ducks, buffleheads and even the common mallard. In the case of the mallard, the female will often incite one or more males to display by utilizing a variety of sounds and movements. She might swim with her neck outstretched and her head barely above the water in what’s known as nod-swimming, while simultaneously delivering a series of disconnected quacks and head-flicking.

Once the likely candidates are connected, pair bonding begins in earnest. This part of courtship is especially important for the 90 percent of species where the pair stays together to rear the young. The pair bonding is more of a brief encounter in the 10 percent where only the female remains with the young birds until they fledge.

Feeding the female is one of the more anthropomorphic activities that birds engage in during pair bonding. The male is, in effect, demonstrating his ability to provide food for the female during the often stressful and precarious time of egg-laying and incubation. Equally important to providing food is the male’s abilities at nest building. Draw your own parallels to the human animal if you will.

Mutual preening, or allopreening, is a common part of courtship. The idea behind allopreening is to cement the pair bond by attending to those parts of the plumage that are hard to reach, such as the head and neck. Again from the anthropomorphic angle, it’s sort of like having your mate scrub those parts of your back that you just can’t get to without dislocating your shoulder.

Loons and grebes have elaborate rituals that take advantage of the placement of their legs and feet toward the rear of their bodies. Western grebes, for instance, take part in one of the more spectacular examples of pair bonding. The male and female lift their bodies from the water and run across the surface in a coordinated exhibition of togetherness. At the end of their run, one dives into the water and is followed closely by the other.

Well known and well-documented in the avian world are the graceful dances of cranes. One observer wrote eloquently on the courting rituals of sandhill cranes, noting how the birds performed leaps and pirouettes, bowing and hopping to some unheard minuet. These birds become so involved in their dance that at one time they were easy targets for hunters before they became gained protected status.

Communal courtship occurs in species such as the sage grouse of western North America. On courting grounds known as leks, the male grouse strut and display while the females walk through and seek the attention of a particular partner. These birds do not form pair bonds since the males are polygynous and the females are promiscuous. In this scenario the pecking order rules since one particular male might be responsible for three quarters of the mating that takes place on the lek.

Not all courting takes place on the water or on terra firma. Hummingbirds will hover and fan their tail feathers to expose the distinctive and intricately-colored patterns of their specific plumage, while snipe and nighthawks perform dazzling aerobatic displays to create sounds with feathers adapted specifically for this purpose. Male and female hawks and eagles, along with several species of swifts, will perform mind-boggling plunges, occasionally locking talons while plunging downward in gravity-defying cartwheels. There have been recorded cases where pairs of eagles have failed to release their grips and tumbled to their deaths.

In addition to the getting-to-know-you aspect of the courtship rituals practiced by birds, all of these movements serve to trigger their individual reproductive responses so that both the male and female are ready for copulation at the same time. When you consider the actual time elapsed during the act of mating, we can only suppose that the preliminaries of courtship and pair bonding were worthwhile.

For a bit of mental exercise, imagine how much wackier our world would be if humans participated in similar outright displays and antics when courting potential mates. But then, maybe we do to some extent. It stands to reason that we do, especially since we’ve borrowed a phrase or two from the animal world to describe our own actions; e.g., busy as a bee, happy as a clam and strutting like a peacock. With all these thoughts about courtship in mind, be on the alert everywhere you go—on the city sidewalks, at dinner parties or in dimly lit taverns—for strutting peacocks. §