To see a manakin in action is to encounter a spectacular song and dance act in the middle of a tropical forest. About half of the 40 know species make music by moving their body part. And in theflush of courtship,males execute maneuvers with names like the dart,the about-face,the upringht,and the backward slid (which looks exactly like a Michael Jackson moonwalk).
Charles Darwin sized up the manakin in the Descent of Man.In his 1871 account of the bird, he wrote: "The diversity of the sounds...and the diversity of the means for producing such sounds,are highly remarkable. We thus gain a high idea of their importance for sexual purposes." But the mechanics of its music making have taken more than a century to uncover.
Just a handful of ornithologists study the club-winged manakin,which lives in Colombia and Ecuador.Probably none is more in ture with the bird than Kim Bostwich. It was Bostwick-first working with her PH.D.adviser st Yale,Richard Prum,and then since 2002 as curator of birds and mammals st the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates-who broke the code of the male clup-winged manakin,a standout among manakins. It is the only species that uses its feathers to generate a tick,tick,ting in the hope of making a female swoon.