2 February 2023, WINGS in Ecuador: Day 5, birding in Mindo and the NW Andes

Male animals have many different ways of courting females, from individual solicitation to showing off as a group. Their rituals are closely tied to the females’ preferences. For Andean cock-of-the-rock, the females want to see all the guys in one place — in a lek — displaying and competing with each other. Witnessing an Andean cock-of-the-cock lek is one of the highlights of our trip.

As a member of the Cotinga family, the Andean cock-of-the-rock (Rupicola peruviana) is very sexually dimorphic. The males are stunning red, black and white with a large red crest from crown to beak.

The males throw a loud and boisterous party at the lek, hoping that the much less colorful females will show up. While we humans focus our attention on the beauty and behavior of the males, a lot is happening behind the scenes.

See and hear the males at the lek in these two videos.

p.s. Today is Groundhog Day back home in Pennsylvania where the northern hemisphere has reached the celestial midpoint between winter and spring. On the equator, days and nights are the same length all year long. The winter and summer solstices have no meaning in Ecuador.

Day and night lengths vary a lot from the Arctic to the Equator, illustrated below by yearlong day/night lengths for three locations: Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow) Alaska, Pittsburgh and Mindo, Ecuador. These Day/Night graphs are screenshots from timeanddate.com.

(photos from Wikimedia Commons; click on the captions to see the originals. Day/night graphs from timeanddate.com; video from William Shaughnessy and American Bird Conservancy on YouTube)