Interior designing for animals..

Renovating your house needs time and effort but its all worth it when it turns out like your dream home. If you think humans are the only ones who shower their homes with beautiful furniture and decorations to impress their friends and families, you’re wrong.

The bowerbird, from the family of Ptilonorhynchindae, consisting of 20 species, spend their time building their work of art all for the sake of impressing and hopefully successfully courting a member of the opposite sex. These highly experienced builders exhibit complex behaviors even though they might not have an extravagant coat to display. In fact, they build bowers complete with a roof, pillars, a neatly preened lawn, furnished with flowers, food and other beautiful things. As female bowerbirds are aptly capable of building their own nests and collecting all the food they need for their young, the males have to up their attraction factor by providing a well equipped and exquisitely neat and decorated bower to showcase their housekeeping capabilities on top of having to exhibit their courtship dance.

The male bowerbirds, depending on the clade they belong to, build either a structure with two vertical walls of twigs or make use of the base of saplings with sticks around it. Nonetheless, these birds will then decorate their home with the things they fancy. But collecting the decorations is just part of the job, the items have to be arranged neatly and these birds can be quite picky about what they choose to have in their house. The Great Bowerbird, Chlamydera nuchalis, for example, prefers white objects while the Satin Bowerbird, ,prefers blue objects.(David Attenborough, 2009) The females travels around viewing each of the bowers which can be decorated with flowers, beetle shells, nuts and fruits in addition to the male displaying their courtship rituals in their presence, and if one is impressed, she will then provide a chance to mate.

However, after mating the female will go back to her nest and look after the young all by herself, leaving the male to continue upgrading his abode and as he hopes, impress other females.

The following are 2 videos on the courting behaviors of Bowerbirds:

Secondary Reference of birds exhibiting similar behaviors: Weaverbirds, who are masters of nest building also use nest to attract opposite genders to mate with them.

* The Development of Nest-Building Behavior in a Weaverbird
* Elsie C. Collias and Nicholas E. Collias
* The Auk, Vol. 81, No. 1 (Jan., 1964), pp. 42-52
(article consists of 11 pages)
* Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Ornithologists’ Union
* Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4082609

Reference:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgHwdLiKIpQ&feature=related
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Attenborough%27s_Life_Stories
http://www.jstor.org/pss/4082609
http://hubpages.com/hub/Courtship-Strategies-What-We-Can-Learn-From-Animals
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPbWJPsBPdA
http://besgroup.talfrynature.com/2008/08/28/australias-own-don-juan-the-bowerbirds/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bower

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