Amazing super-slow-motion footage from the BBC program Life shows the mating display of the marvellous spatuletail hummingbird (Loddigesia mirabilis) of the Peruvian cloud forest:
Unusually among hummingbirds, the bird has just four tail feathers.
In males, two of these feathers grow to three or four times the bird’s body length, each ending in a large violet-blue disc; the spatule.
In an amazing display, a male then advertises its quality as a mate to a female by hovering in front of her while furiously waving his spatules about.
“It’s one of the most extreme displays,” says Mrs Nikki Waldron, a researcher who helped film the behaviour for the programme.
“As part of his dance he’ll jump backward and forwards in the air over a branch and make a snapping sound in the air.”
“It was thought he actually snapped thoxed spatule discs together to generate the noise.” However, the high-speed film of the mating sequence, captured at hundreds of frames per second, reveals that not to be true.
“When we filmed them in super high speed we realised that although the spatules wobble very closely together, the noise is actually coming from his mouth. That was the first time anybody had seen that,” says Mrs Waldron.
The BBC camera team was also the first to record the male marvellous spatuletail hummingbird displaying to a female, and his whole mating display from start to finish.
Low light conditions and the tiny size of the bird made filming especially challenging.
“It’s particularly tricky, in that his body is the size of a slightly fluffy ping-pong ball. His beak is the size of a matchstick. He is just tiny. And quite shy,” says Mrs Waldron.
