Songbirds have been found to stamp their feet in a high-speed courtship ‘tap dance’ that is invisible to the naked eye.
They perform the routine while singing to their mates, a team from Japan and Germany discovered.
Because each bird’s dance becomes more vigorous if its mate is on the same perch, researchers think the vibrations might be adding a tactile element to the courtship.
‘It’s a really rare phenomenon that songbirds produce non-vocal sounds,’ said senior author Masayo Soma, from Hokkaido University in Japan.
The team studied 16 blue-capped cordon-bleus – a species of waxbill native to sub-Saharan Africa. To capture the dance, they filmed the birds at 300 frames per second, and established the birds performed bursts of three or four rapid steps. A single step lasted as little as six frames of high-speed video – or just two hundredths of a second.
The dance is especially impressive because the birds are multi-tasking – clutching a piece of nesting material in their beaks, tilting their heads upward, bobbing up and down and singing – while watching their partner at the same time. – Daily Mail