Victoria's Riflebird - Ptiloris victoriae

The Victoria's Riflebird is a species of bird-of-paradise that lives year-round in Australia, the continent to the south of Papua New Guinea. New Guinea is home to the majority of bird-of-paradise species. Which begs the question, which one is actually the paradise? I don't know about you, but I'm going for the place with the giant mountains and real-life, tree-dwelling teddies (see later post on Tree Kangaroos). So it comes as no surprise that the riflebirds would choose to nominally secede from their relatives. Apparently, this new species name was based upon a resemblance to the colouration of the uniforms of British riflemen. Good thing Australia wasn't settled by America, otherwise they'd just be called 'Personbirds'.

The Victoria's Riflebird is a polygynous species - 'poly-' meaning 'many' (e.g. "What's the name of the Modern Family kid?" "Oh, Manny?" "Yeah but what's his nickname?" "Oh right, I gotcha - Poly." "Brilliant, thanks Tim. Hey man, can you get up and help me put this dog in the oven?"), and '-gyn', relating to the females of the species (e.g. "Thanks Tim, next time we really should have like chloroformed the dog, or something. Putting that thing in alive, with it biting and barking and all that, it just felt cruel - and really inefficient." "Hey Toby, what's the Latin term for 'to do with female'?" "Oh, that'd be 'gyn', Tim."). Basically what this breaks down to is that, in their mating relationships, there will be multiple females to every male - while a single female is loyal, serviced by only a single male, that same male will have flounced around slurrily, constantly dabbing ferociously in a desperate quest for love.

When, as David Attenborough would say, 'the air is thick with the scent of females' (we all know what that's like, right?), a solitary male will display himself on chosen, frequented perches, such as the high stumps of broken tree trunks. Males will defend these perches when the air is at its thickest, which as we all know, is from July-December. The male starts his courtship wings raised, flexing his radius-like curved wings around his body and shunting his iridescent, blue chest into the face of the woman. He stays still like this, typically, in the beginning of the performance. Minimalism is strength. The best performers will twitch a finger and achieve feints from rows 1-6, and the male riflebird knows this. Alluring the female hypnotically with his particularly meticulous pectoral manscaping, he gets her to the point where all her hopes and desires are situated squarely above his sternum. They're simple creatures. At that immediate moment, it becomes time to strike. Suddenly, he unleashes a sensory overload so blinding you'd be forgiven for thinking the female would shortly combust. Twisting his wings side-to-side, swinging his head with or against them, his whole body transforms into a fluid sensation that blurs the lines between what is real and what's just the non-canonical fan fiction to reality. Females who survive this loco, blissful (Coco Blissful? Oh, nope. Sorry.) experience may allow the male to mate with them resultantly.