In over a decade of watching the courtship dances of male parotias,
Cornell lab scientist, Ed Scholes, had never seen them from the perspective
from which they evolved.
In fact, nobody had.
Every description and documentation of these dances had been observed
from the ground.
Nobody had ever viewed them from the branch hanging above the display court,
from the female’s point of view.
In other words, nobody has fully understood what female parotias find so
attractive about the male’s dance.
On their eighteenth and last expedition in New Guinea, Ed and Tim Laman used new
technology and a new strategy
to get above the display court of a male Wahnes’s Parotia
and capture the first glimpse
of what a female parotia sees from her perch.
Doing so required a little ingenuity,
thorough planning,
and a considerable amount of patience.
Male parotias pay remarkable attention to detail
when building their display courts.
They clear away all of the ferns,
small saplings and leaves
to open up a space on the forest floor.
They trim away leaves from overhanging limbs to open a pathway for the sun,
a natural light source for their dance court.
Males are careful to select sites
with an elevated horizontal branch
so females have a spot to perch and to get a good view.
Ed and Tim had to employ their own engineering design to capture
this perspective.
This diagram shows their plan,
three cameras set up to simultaneously record the dance
from multiple angles.
Camera “A” was positioned in the ground blind.
From this spot,
Tim could photograph the traditional view with a long lens,
getting the fine details of the display.
Ed would be next to him, controlling cameras “B” and “C”,
the two other remote units.
Camera “B” was concealed off to the side of the court
with a wide-angle lens
to get a view of the entire scene
and camera “C” was for the female perspective.
It was deployed in a tree ten feet above the court
with a line of sight directly down to the female’s perch and
onto where the male would dance below.
Each piece of gear had to be installed when the birds
were away from the display court.
All of it had to be hidden so as not to disturb the birds,
especially the wary females.
More than two hundred feet of camouflaged cables were unfurled to
connect the whole set up.
After installing their three-camera system,
Ed and Tim sat in the blind
and waited…
And waited.
For two weeks, the birds teased.
They were around
but not very active.
It was about time to pack up camp and head out.
And then, the big break,
the show they had been waiting so long to see
finally began.
Here's the traditional view from the ground blind.
The displaying male looks like a ballerina wearing a skirt or tutu.
In fact,
Ed calls this display the "ballerina dance."
Here's the view from the wide camera.
And here's the view from the female perspective.
Here are the two remote cameras together.
While Ed knew the female perspective of the male’s display would be different,
he never dreamed there was a totally new discovery waiting to be uncovered.
By observing the male’s courtship dance from above,
a relatively minor patch of iridescent feathers on the back of the head
comes into view.
To the female,
this appears to be a visual cue tracing the side to side head movements which
would otherwise be invisible against the velvet-black backdrop
created by the male skirt.
Until Ed and Tim saw their video,
they hadn't understood the significance of this little ornament.
In a single moment,
they had captured a unique insight into the forces of sexual selection
that drive the evolution
of the birds-of-paradise.