page_title: Satin bowerbird
section_title: Courtship
hierarchical_section_title: Satin bowerbird / Courtship
caption_attribution_description: English: photo of Satin Bowerbird at his bower
context_page_description: The satin bowerbird is a bowerbird endemic to eastern Australia.
  A rare natural intergeneric hybrid between the satin bowerbird and the regent bowerbird is known as Rawnsley's bowerbird.
context_section_description: Like all bowerbirds, the satin bowerbird shows highly complex courtship behaviour. Mate choice in satin bowerbirds has been studied in detail. Males build specialised stick structures, called bowers, which they decorate with blue, yellow, and shiny objects, including berries, flowers, and plastic items such as ballpoint pens, drinking straws and clothes pegs. As the males mature they use more blue objects than other colours. Females visit these and choose which male they will allow to mate with them. In addition to building their bowers, males carry out intense behavioural displays called dances to woo their mates, but these can be treated as threat displays by the females. Nestbuilding and incubation are carried out by the females alone.
  Recent research has shown that female mate choice takes place in three stages:
  Visits to the bowers, before nests have been built, while the males are absent
  Visits to the bowers, before nests have been built, while the males are present and displaying
  Visits to a selection of the bowers, after nests have been built, leading to copulation with (typically) a single male.
  Experimental manipulations of the ornaments around the bowers have shown that the choices of young females (those in their first or second year of breeding) are mainly influenced by the appearance of the bowers, and hence by the first stage of this process. Older females, which are less affected by the threatening aspect of the males' displays, make their choices more on the basis of the males' dancing displays. It has been hypothesised that as males mature their colour discrimination develops and they are able to select more blue objects for the bower. It is not yet known whether this description would also hold true for other species of bowerbird.
  
  Male satin bowerbirds are known to destroy and steal from the bowers of one another. The quality of a male's own bower does not predict how often they will destroy others. However, males who exhibit more aggression by attacking others at feeding sites tend to destroy competitor bowers more frequently.
caption: Satin bowerbird at his bower
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