Club-winged Manakin

                                                        

Club-winged Manakin

The Club-winged Manakin (Machaeropterus deliciosus) is a resident breeder in the cloud forest on the western slopes of the Andes Mountains of Colombia and northwestern Ecuador in South America.

Wings & Sound

The really cool part about this bird is that the males produce a violin-like sound in order to attract the females with their wings. Kind of like how crickets use wings to chirp!

                                        

According to a Cornell University ornithologist in the July 29 issue of Science, male club-winged manakins use specially adapted feathers in each wing to make a tone - much like a cricket chirping by rubbing together sound-making apparatus in its wings.

                                                 

This sound makes the male more attractive to the females.

                                                 

"Essentially an instrument has evolved in this species, in this case a refined instrument," said Kimberly Bostwick, the paper's lead author, a curator in the birds and mammals division of Cornell's Museum of Vertebrates and a research associate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Description

The colorful males of the species have brownish-red feathers, a bright red crown, and black and white wings. The less colorful females are mainly a yellow-green color.

                                               

The males of this species gather in an area in order to try and attract the attention of the females. The females mate with their chosen male, and then leave the mating area in order to build a nest and raise the young. The males don't raise the young, they mainly stick around where they were before, trying to attract the next female. As you can tell, these birds don't pair up for life.

They average 2.5 cm or 4.9 inches in length, from beak to tip of tail.

Diet

Club-winged Manakins mainly eat fruit but may sometimes supplement their diet with insects. In fact, they can open up their beaks quite a bit, so much so that they can swallow fruits quite large in size. In return for getting much-needed nutrition from the plants they depend on, these birds effectively disperse the seeds of the fruits they eat and, thus, help regenerate their own food supply in the process.

Breeding / Nesting

The average clutch consists of two eggs, which are incubated for 18 to 21 days.