Artful Builder

Sighting the fabled bowerbird

It had a most unmelodic song, like the sound of someone shoveling gravel. But when U.C.L.A. Ornithologist Jared Dia mond crept forward for a closer look, he encountered a bizarre and beautiful spectacle. As he reported at a news conference in Washington, D.C., last week, there in a mile-high rain forest in western New Guinea was a golden-crested male bird about the size of a bluejay . It was standing in front of a remarkable structure of its own making, a 4-ft.-high bower of long sticks and fronds, shaped like a Maypole around a sapling and surrounded by three piles of artfully arranged fruit-- blue, green and yellow. The male "held a bright blue fruit in its bill and pointed it toward the female, so it could be seen against the background of its golden crest." The courting creature also emitted a series of odd cries while quivering its crest seductively. Diamond watched for 20 min utes, but "the male did not succeed and the female flew off."

What he had seen was a yellow-fronted gardener bowerbird (Amblyornis flavi-frons). Though New York's American Museum of Natural History has two skins and the British Museum one (preserved since 1895), no Westerner had ever laid eyes on live specimens before, let alone observed their elaborate courtship ritual.

The monogamous swan caresses the head and neck of his beloved while uttering soft cries. Male argus pheasants impress with an involved dance, spreading their wings to form a saucer for a finale.

But bowerbirds rank among the most intricately amatory of avians. Some build bowers up to 8 ft. high and paint them with berry juice, using a twig as a brush. The structure serves as erotic artwork rather than as a love nest. If a female is won over, she will build a drabber, more functional nest.

Excitement over the find may have been slightly dampened because photo graphs that Diamond took of the birds were lost when a small boat he was traveling in capsized. Experts believe his story anyway.

"Normally, one would want a photograph, specimen or more than one observer," says Roger Tory Peterson, noted ornithologist-artist. "But Diamond seems credible, and, knowing New Guinea, I am not surprised by his boat trouble." According to Donald Bruning, curator of birds at the Bronx Zoo, Diamond is "one of the half-dozen people most qualified to identify this bowerbird."

Besides, he notes, the bird is not easily confused with any other species. "It is quite unique."

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