Three-speed bowerbird
| Three-speed bowerbird | ||||||||||||
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Representation of a pair of three-gang bowerbirds ( Chlamydera lauterbachi ), ♂ left and ♀ right |
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Chlamydera lauterbachi | ||||||||||||
| Reichenow , 1897 |
The three-gang bowerbird ( Chlamydera lauterbachi ) is a species of bird from the family of bowerbirds (Ptilonorhynchidae) and a representative of the avifauna of New Guinea. Compared to Australian foliage birds such as the silk Laubenvogel ( Ptilonorhynchus violaceus ) or columns gardener ( Prionodura newtoniana ) the lifestyle of the native to the New Guinea rainforest three-speed foliage bird is little explored.
With a body length of up to 27 centimeters, the three-gang bowerbird belongs to a medium-sized species in the family of bowerbirds and is one of the species of this family whose courtship behavior includes the construction of an arbor by the male. The German name for this type of bower bird alludes to the shape of this bower. It consists of four walls, so that the arbor has a central aisle and two cross aisles. In contrast to many bowerbirds, the sex dimorphism is not very pronounced in this species. There are two subspecies.
Three-gang bowerbirds are very long-lived and take several years to reach sexual maturity. Due to the intelligence they show when building their arbors, they are counted among the most intelligent of the birds. The population of the three-gang bowerbird was classified in the IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species in 2016 as “ Least Concern (LC) ” = “not endangered”.
features
Three-gang bowerbirds reach a body length of 27 centimeters, of which 10.2 to 11.5 centimeters are on the tail. The beak length in the male is 2.6 to 2.9 centimeters. There is no information on the beak length for females. The males reach a weight between 128 and 135 grams, females remain slightly lighter at 112 to 120 grams.
male
In the male, the head is yellowish olive green with a coppery tinge. The parting is copper-red. The feathers on the sides of the face and on the neck have pale feather shafts, creating a slight dash. The rest of the upper part of the body is brownish olive with pale feather shafts and pale isabel-colored to olive-green feather edges, which makes the plumage appear scaly.
The wing covers and the arm and hand wings are gray-brown to olive-brown with pale feather edges and whitish to yellowish feather tips. The upper tail-coverts are a little more yellowish. The tail plumage is gray-brown, the outer tail feathers are lined with yellowish tones and the feather shafts are matt ocher in color.
The chin, throat, and front chest are grayish to pale yellow. The individual feathers are lined with gray-brown or olive-colored. The rest of the underside of the body is sand-colored with pale gray-brown transverse bands on the chest and flanks. The iris is dark brown and the beak is black.
Females and young birds
The female resembles the male, but is generally a little more dull in color, the top of the head is a little more yellow. The copper-colored shimmer of the crown that characterizes the males is missing.
Subadult males are similar to females, but usually some of the feathers on the apex are copper-red. Fledglings that have just fledged are slightly more dotted than adult birds due to their whitish-yellow feather shafts. The underside of the beak and the throat are still whitish with gray feather edges. The top of the body is dark gray with whitish feather shafts. The upper tail-coverts have whitish feather tips. The control springs are more olive in color.
voice
The calls of the three- course bower bird are a sharp chilp chilp chilp as well as rattling and hissing sounds. It also mimics the sounds of the environment, such as water running quickly over gravel or the squeaking of pigs. A three-gaited bowerbird kept in captivity also mimicked the sound of a chainsaw and hammering. In the wild, mimicking the calls of other bird species has not yet been proven. A male cared for in human care mimicked the voices of numerous bird species in the area.
Distribution area and habitat
The three-speed bower bird occurs in New Guinea from the mountain ranges in the west to the Huon Peninsula . The altitude distribution extends from the lowlands to altitudes of 1770 m. The three-gaited bower bird is missing on the Vogelkop in northwest New Guinea. In the region around the Marienberg , in the valley of the Ramu as well as in the Finisterre Mountains and in the Saruwaged Mountains , the distribution area of the three- gang bowerbird overlaps with the brown-bellied bowerbird belonging to the same genus .
Two subspecies are described in the range:
- Chlamydera lauterbachi lauterbachi - (Reichenow, 1897) . The nominate form occurs from the Ramu Valley to the Huon Peninsula .
- Chlamydera lauterbachi uniformis - Rothschild, 1931 . The subspecies occurs in the lowlands of northwest New Guinea from the Siriwo River to the Mamberamo Valley . In this subspecies the copper-colored parting is missing in the male. Instead, the parting is olive green.
The three-gang bower bird is only sparsely distributed in this distribution area.
The habitat of the three-gang bowerbird is leftover forest, secondary forest, forest edges, overgrown gardens and bushy grassland. It is also found in swamps with tall grass and on coffee plantations.
Way of life
The three-gang bower bird is a very shy bird and very difficult to observe in the wild. It eats fruits and insects, including caterpillars and beetles. As is typical for most bowerbird species, the males are polygynous , meaning that they mate with several females. The female alone builds the nest, incubates the clutch and takes care of the rearing of the young birds. One of the most notable characteristics of the three-gaited bowerbird is the extremely complex arbor house that the males use to woo the females.
Location of the arbors
The arbors are usually in dense vegetation under a large, bushy tree or on the edge of the forest near Saccharum spontaneum grassland, which is interspersed with individual bushes and trees. The majority of the arbors are on flat, dry land. Some three-gang bowerbirds also build their arbors in wetlands. Here the platform lifts the arbor out of the surrounding damp and flat land like an island.
Shape of the arbor
The three-course bowerbird, like the silk and yellow-naped bowerbird, is one of the species among the bowerbirds that build an "avenue" or "alley". However, the arbor of the three-flight bowerbird differs from the avenues of other bowerbirds in that it has four rather than two walls. The walls of the middle corridor face outwards, while other avenue builders among the bowerbirds either incline their walls inwards or build them vertically. The middle avenue is based on a thick platform made of branches and grass, which extends at both ends of the avenue. At both ends of the platform there is another wall across the main avenue. The arbor thus has a central aisle and two cross aisles. The middle aisle is laid out on the sides with individual grasses.
In the Waghi valley of the Kup region, 16 arbors of the subspecies Chlamydera lauterbachi uniformis were measured more precisely: the arbors were 71 to 97 centimeters long, 48 to 66 centimeters wide and 36 to 64 centimeters high. The middle aisle was 6 to 8 inches wide and 17 to 32 inches long. Including the small pebbles that the males use to decorate the arbors, the construction weighed between 3 and 7.5 kilograms.
The males decorate their arbor with pebbles, which are predominantly gray to gray-blue and red, blue-gray and brown fruits. In a particularly large arbor, more than 3,000 branches were built, more than 1,000 blades of grass were laid down, and it was decorated with more than 1,000 stones with a total weight of almost 4.5 kilograms. Stones and fruits are mainly placed at the end of the inner walls and on the arbor floor. Exceptions are the red fruits: These are not only placed on the arbor floor, but also in the outer surrounding area of the arbor. Where there are missing stones, the three-course bowerbird also uses bits of coal for decoration. The deposited fruits are comparatively large: many of the fruits are 1.5 to 3 centimeters in diameter. Fruits of the genus Elaeocarpus are used particularly frequently .
The male also decorates the walls with crushed fruit and vegetable pulp. This behavior, which is known as “painting” and occurs in several species of bowerbird, is particularly noticeable in the three-gang bowerbird. The males show this behavior comparatively often and sometimes spend between 10 and 15 minutes with it.
Courtship of the male
The male's courtship consists of several elements, all of which take place in - or in the immediate vicinity - of the arbor.
During the first phase of courtship, males hop on a spot in front of one of the arcades. They call softly. He then approaches the entrance of the arbor that the female is looking at. He then turns his head so that the neck points towards the female and usually takes one of the decorative objects in his beak. Usually it is one of the blue or red fruits with which he decorated the arbor. One of the pebbles is rarely taken in the beak during courtship. If it does not hold a decorative object in its beak, then the beak is usually wide open so that the orange-colored inside of the beak is visible. He lets his tongue flick out again and again, jerks his head and calls out softly. The tail is strongly bristled. Then the male stands up, quickly opening and closing one or both wings while making hissing noises. Often he then takes red fruits in his beak. The mating takes place in the center aisle of the arbor.
Nest, clutch and rearing of the young birds
Nests with clutches or nestlings, which could clearly be assigned to the three-gaited bower bird, were found in all months of the year. The females build their nests in forks of branches of trees or in the branches of tall grasses of the species Saccharum spontanem , of which sugar cane also belongs. The nest is usually one to three meters above the ground.
The nest is a carefully built bowl made of thin twigs, lianas, dry grass and occasionally bits of bark, which is built on a platform from a few twigs. All clutches found so far consisted of just one egg. The eggs are pale or pearly gray and have dark gray, blackish and black spots. A freshly laid egg has a weight that corresponds to around 13.3 percent of the body weight of a female.
Bowerbirds and people
According to Clifford and Dawn Frith, the three-gaited bowerbird's unusual shyness of humans indicates that they are hunted by the indigenous people of New Guinea.
attitude
The three-gang bowerbird has not yet been kept in captivity and, unlike some other species of bowerbird, has not been shown in zoos . Up until 2004, husbandry experiences were only available for a single male who was kept in the nature reserve in the Baiyer River Sanctuary , Western Highlands Province , Papua New Guinea.
Dedication names
The specific epithet Lauterbachi is reminiscent of the German biologist Karl Lauterbach , who worked as a biologist and geographer in the research of German New Guinea .
literature
- Bruce M. Beehler, Thane K. Pratt: Birds of New Guinea; Distribution, Taxonomy, and Systematics . Princeton University Press, Princeton 2016, ISBN 978-0-691-16424-3 .
- Clifford B. Frith, Dawn. W. Frith: The Bowerbirds - Ptilonorhynchidae . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, ISBN 0-19-854844-3 .
- Peter Rowland: Bowerbirds . Csiro Publishing, Collingwood 2008, ISBN 978-0-643-09420-8 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Handbook of the Birds of the World on the Dreigang-Laubenvogel. In: hbw.com , accessed April 7, 2017
- ↑ a b c d Frith: The Bowerbirds - Ptilonorhynchidae . P. 392.
- ↑ Frith: The Bowerbirds - Ptilonorhynchidae . P. 388.
- ↑ Chlamydera lauterbachi in the endangered Red List species the IUCN 2016 Posted by: BirdLife International, 2016. Accessed November 18, 2017th
- ↑ a b Frith: The Bowerbirds - Ptilonorhynchidae . P. 390.
- ↑ Frith: The Bowerbirds - Ptilonorhynchidae . P. 389.
- ↑ a b c d e Frith: The Bowerbirds - Ptilonorhynchidae . P. 391.
- ^ A b c Beehler & Pratt: Birds of New Guinea . P. 281.
- ↑ a b Beehler & Pratt: Birds of New Guinea . P. 282.
- ↑ Frith: The Bowerbirds - Ptilonorhynchidae . P. 166.
- ↑ a b Frith: The Bowerbirds - Ptilonorhynchidae . P. 394.
- ↑ a b Frith: The Bowerbirds - Ptilonorhynchidae . P. 395.
Web links
- Video: Chlamydera lauterbachi (Ptilonorhynchidae) - Building on the arbor . Institute for Scientific Film (IWF) 1967, made available by the Technical Information Library (TIB), doi : 10.3203 / IWF / E-1080 .
- Video: Chlamydera lauterbachi (Ptilonorhynchidae) - courtship . Institute for Scientific Film (IWF) 1967, made available by the Technical Information Library (TIB), doi : 10.3203 / IWF / E-1081 .