Duetting and other synchronised displays of the blue-backed manakins, Chiroxiphia Spp

Abstract

The blue-backed manakins of the genus Chiroxiphia are apparently unique among birds in the organisation of their courtship displays. They belong to a family (Pipridae) in which many species show a high degree of sexual dimorphism and lek displays are highly developed. In the other manakins that have been studied, as in lek birds of other familes, each male defends and displays on his own court or perch within the general area of the lek; but blue-backed manakin males live in groups which jointly display on a number of perches within their territory. One of the most remarkable aspects of their organisation is that the advertising calls which are a prelude to the courtship display, and the first phase of the courtship display itself, are performed in perfect co-ordination by two males from the group (or, in one species, three or more birds), each of which appears to play an equal part. The highly synchronised duets that are important in the courtship sequence are thus quite different from duets described in other birds, the main function of which is to maintain contact between the members of permanently mated pairs (Thorpe, 1972).

David W. Snow was born in Windermere, England. After three years’ wartime and postwar service with the RNVR he read zoology at Oxford, and became a postgraduate student at the Edward Grey Institute. He worked on the comparative ecology and geographical variation of Palaearctic titmice and on blackbirds, and in 1957 became Resident Naturalist at the New York Zoological Society’s tropical field station in Trinidad. After nearly five years there he became director of the Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galapagos Islands, returning to England in 1964 as Director of Research for the British Trust for Ornithology. He was appointed to his present post in 1968.