The courtship displays of birds-of-paradise have been often described as the most spectacular in the animal kingdom. The difficulty in studying these species, that live in rainforests of New Guinea and Queensland, has limited our understanding of the function of their courtship displays. We show here that the courtship display of males of Victoria’s riflebirds is a dynamic sequence of accelerating wing-claps intercalated by yellow flashes produced by showing the yellow interior of the beak. Only males that succeed in displaying for at least 16 seconds can reach a tempo plateau and have then chances of obtaining a copulation.
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fusanilab 