as these visual, visually amazing creatures, but they use sounds. Its a jungle out there. When most people think of Birds-of-Paradise or look at pictures of them
or video, theyre not thinking about them as being interesting
acoustically. But yet, when you
step back and you bother to pay attention to sounds
of Birds-of-Paradise, you realize that the kinds of
sounds that the males make in courtship, or prior to courtship,
are nearly as phenomenal as the way that they look and behave.
This usually is something
that begins as a long-distance way of attracting females to
the display site, so males have a vocalization I always think of it
as their primary vocalization or their main territorial vocalization
or their main advertisement vocalization. And that's the one that we use even
as researchers or scientists or birders to locate them. Its the most conspicuous
thing that they do, and thats by design. Thats how the females
find them as well.
Then in the process
of courtship display, there's a whole range
of other sounds that are also given but they're much less conspicuous,
much less commonly heard by us. Sometime these are
the same sounds but much more commonly they're not,
theyre a totally different set. Just like all thirty-nine species look
distinct, they do all sound distinct. Now some of the ones that are more
closely related that also look more similar, they also sound more similar.
But when you find two species
that look extremely different, like a lot of Birds-of-Paradise
do from one another, they actually sound as extremely different
as they look. Even though there's a huge amount of diversity in the
types of sounds Birds-of-Paradise make, I would say most people still think of them as being these
more crow-like caw caw caw kind of sounds. And no doubt, a lot of
species do make a plain, not-that-interesting, sounding
kind of crow-like, squawk. Parotias do that, a handful
of other things do that.
But, that being said, the ones that do have
interesting sounds, they sound nothing at all like even a bird.
In fact, many of them don't even sound like things made by a living organism.
They sound like a sound that would be from a human machine. Several good examples come
to my mind as being the classic or the best examples of those
extreme sounds of Birds-of-Paradise. The Brown Sicklebill, in particular, makes this very non-bird-like
machine gun sound.
Another one of the greatest
sounds, is the male King-of-Saxony. It gives this very
unnatural sound thats just unlike anything you've heard before,
certainly coming out of the mouth of a bird. Then there are a number of species that
are kind of reminiscent of a bird-like sound. Some of these would be the Curl-crested Manucode, which in my mind often sounds
a little bit like a UFO landing.
And then things like
the Magnificent Riflebird, which has a nice
musical quality to it. Even though it's called the
riflebird, it doesn't sound like a gun. A handful of species have very
conspicuous non-vocal sounds that they make, usually in the context of
close proximity display to a female. The best examples of that are the riflebirds.
All three species,
when they lift up their wings and theyre moving them back and forth,
and the males are usually hiding their head
behind their wing. All three of them have this
sound that sounds like some kind of rustling fabric or paper. Swoosh, swoosh, back and forth, that moves
with the wings and that's actually being produced by the wings themselves,
thats not a vocal sound. The Superb Bird-of-Paradise
is another really great example where during the main display there's this
snapping sound.
He's doing something with his wings
and it looks like with his tail where hes moving
them out quickly, creating like a
whip-like "snap". I think the thing
that I find the most intriguing or
interesting about sounds of Bird-of-Paradise
is that for literally centuries, people have been
so focused on the way that they look, and that's obviously for good reason
theyre pretty awesome, pretty extraordinary. But sound is just another
extreme thing, just like the colors and the behaviors, in that they've evolved as much diversity in
the way that they use sound for courtship and for attracting females, as any other kind of ornament
that Birds-of-Paradise have. And thats what really
makes the sound special in Birds-of-Paradise..
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