Love and kisses in the Wren World
You don’t have to go haring off into the bush to see really interesting things happening in the bird world. A while back I was watching the test cricket. Because nothing had happened for a couple of hours my attention wandered, and I noticed a couple of little wrens on the deck.
Superb Fairywrens are a bird we’re all familiar with, and rightly so, the bright blue males are eye-catching and gorgeous. But this one was doing something very dashing indeed - he was offering the brown female a yellow flower, plucked from my hibbertia bush nearby.
Males do this with courting females who are already paired with some other male (his own female doesn’t seem to get this treatment). Although they form pairs, they are quite promiscuous creatures and in any fairywren family many of the offspring are fathered by other males - no doubt while the male is off seducing other females.
But the bright blue males don’t stay in that plumage for long: quite a few of the brown birds are males ‘in eclipse’, meaning they aren’t breeding. It’s pretty tiring work being the breeding male, as during breeding season their testes grow to weigh up to a third of their body mass. During this period they are like human teenagers, and have only two things on their minds: food and sex. So, some of the brown birds are females, some are males in eclipse, and some are juveniles. You can bet the difference between them is obvious to a breeding male.
