Songbirds Tap Dance To Attract Potential Mates

Scientists actually filmed the birds as they tried their luck with cage mates, and found that both males and females turned to tap to seduce their targets.

In this photograph, you can see one of the bird’s feet raised as it performs its courtship tap dance.

The blue-capped cordon-bleu (Uraeginthus cyanocephalus) has a special talent.

As surprising as this discovery might be, co-author Manfred Gahr of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany, thinks there’s a chance more songbirds are doing it, but our naked eye has just missed it. Dr. Soma and her colleagues in Japan were the first interested in studying the birds under the “microscope” of the high-speed cameras. The only sex difference in temporal pattern of the blue-capped cordon-bleus courtship display is the slightly shorter song produced by females. The bobbing movements seem to exaggerate the sexually dimorphic plumage of their heads and nesting materials that they hold. While normally the songbird’s dance is so fast that the fancy footwork is otherwise invisible, new efforts have shown the true extent of this unbelievable dance. While it is well-known that socially monogamous songbird males sing to attract females, we report here the first example of a multimodal dance display that is not a uniquely male trait in these birds.

The birds tapped faster when sharing a perch with the object of their affection, perhaps as a way to add tactile vibrations to their otherwise visual and auditory display.

The footage reveals that a cordon-bleu performs an average of 3.17 stomps per bob. Additionally, they also produce non-vocal sounds. When the mate was on the same perch, both sexes intensified their dance performances.

“It’s a really rare phenomenon that songbirds produce non-vocal sounds”, explained Masayo Soma of Hokkaido University in Japan, lead researcher of the study. However, little is known about how animals can temporally coordinate naturally produced multicomponent acoustic signals (i.e., vocal and non-vocal sounds).

“It wasn’t very easy to record the behaviours because these birds are very choosy, and they only perform courtship displays to the individuals they like”, Dr Soma said.

Researchers also found that cordon-bleus execute about six steps at a time which decreases while they are singing.