new feathers are more yellowish
2007
mango 2
The juvenile’s feathers are more fluffy and look more disordered here. Actually, mango is covered in squashed mango too, so s/he looks a bit more bedraggled than usual. In this detail of under the tail the more obvious barring of juveniles can be clearly seen
young mango 1
Mango (caught in the mango trap) is a much younger bird with no nuchal crest
feather details
Birds are aged by the replacement of feathers in their wings
green nugget experiment
Here I was testing to what extent bowerbirds would steal objects from other bowers. This container of green glass nuggets was placed equidistant between bowers 5, 12 and 4 (which was quite close to bower 12). The bower 12 bird took many of the nuggets. In the end two nuggets were moved from bower …
I still want to do this
Another idea that I couldn’t do for The Systems of Nature was to collect up all the published information about bowerbirds and to use biological software that plots the relatedness of things to be able to draw a sort of evolutionary chart of bowerbird research. This type here always reminds me of dandelions.