Burch's bowerbirds

Last year, one of LM’s freshmen Biology teachers was conspicuously missing: Mr. Burch. Burch—famous for his bird-watching excursions, tree-climbing skills, creative experiments, engaging lectures, music instrument building, and love of nature—took a trip to Australia to study the bowerbird.

Bowerbirds, known for the horseshoe-like structures called bowers that they build out of twigs and their knack for collecting blue objects, are very unusual. Most animals only build functional structures; bowerbirds are unique in the sense that they construct bow- ers as a matter of pride and for the purpose of attracting a mate. Burch likes to describe them as “architects.”

Over the course of a few trips, Burch and his wife travelled to Australia to study the unique behaviors of this bird. They made their most recent trip with three goals in mind: to test radio trackers on the species, to discover why it chooses blue to decorate its bower, and to understand why it almost always builds its bower oriented towards the north.

Burch dubs the bowerbirds “sneaky”— they are very difficult to find in nature and the science community is searching for a good way to locate them. Burch and his wife conducted radio-tracking experiments by in- serting radio-transmitters, which use hearing aid batteries, into blue straws and left them out for bowerbirds to steal. Unfortunately, this radio-tracking method did not work well, because it was not always easy to get a bow- erbird to take the blue straw. One bird, which the Burches named “Radio Bower,” stole the tracker  five  times.

The second area of research was more fruitful. Burch and his wife discovered that bowerbirds, known to be attracted to blue, are actually more attracted to yellow. They set  out  four  yellow  flowers  called  Nightlillies,  four blue objects, and four cicada shells for 20 different birds, and returned to measure how far from and at what angle to the bower the objects were placed. In every case, the birds  brought  the  Nightlillies  closest  to  their  bowers. This discovery is groundbreaking in the  field  of  zoology!  

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