Bird watching in Australia - Great bowerbird

The great bowerbird (Chlamydera nuchalis) is a common and conspicuous resident of northern Australia, from the area around Broome across the Top End to Cape York Peninsula and as far south as Mount Isa. Favoured habitat is a broad range of forest and woodland, and the margins of vine forests, monsoon forest, and mangrove swamps.

As with most members of the bowerbird family, breeding considerations dominate the lifecycle: females nest inconspicuously and raise their young alone, while the males spend most of the year building, maintaining, improving, defending, and above all displaying from their bowers. Only a male with a successful bower can attract mates.

The great bowerbird is the largest of the bowerbird family and is 33 to 38 cm long and fawny grey in colour. Males have a small but conspicuous pink crest on the nape of the neck.

Range map from www.oiseaux.net - Ornithological Portal Oiseaux.net

www.oiseaux.net is one of those MUST visit pages if you're in to bird watching. You can find just about everything there

Bower
The bower is a twin-walled avenue-type bower approximately 1 metre long and 45 cm high. It is typically located under a shrub or leafy branch. The ends of the bower are scattered with white and green objects - stones, bones, shells and leaves and small man-made objects such as plastic and bottle caps. Within the bower itself is sometimes placed clear glass.

Uniquely among bowerbirds, groups of young males will attend a single bower concurrently, "practising" their bower-building skills prior to establishing their own bower for mating purposes.

Bower

noun a pleasant shady place under trees or climbing plants in a garden or wood.

• poetic/literary a summer house or country cottage.

• poetic/literary a lady's private room or bedroom.

verb [with OBJ.] poetic/literary shade or enclose (a place or person): [as ADJ.] (bowered) the bowered pathways into the tangle of vines.

ORIGIN Old English bur dwelling, inner room, of Germanic origin; related to German Bauer ‘birdcage’.

A bower - We can see all the colourful things the bird have collected

Mareeba July 2016

Listen to the Great bowerbird

Sound from www.xeno-canto.org

Conservation status

Least Concern (IUCN 3.1)

IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2013.2.
International Union for Conservation of Nature. Retrieved 26 November 2013.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia