What animal mating displays have you seen?
I regularly see tailorbirds flash their black throats when calling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUk3QcBt-28
Historically I believe I have seen the peacock mating display, but not anytime recently.
I believe this year I have seen the Yellow-billed Babbler mating display (where they like fan their wings, and turn side to side calling loudly)
I’m actually unsure as to whether it is a mating display at all, but I chose to include it here.
I meant the displays; rituals, dances, (eg. Peacock, Bulbul, Albatross, Jumping Spider) that stuff.
:)
And I forgot to mention I have seen Plexippus petersi mating dances.
A few years back I got to see a bit of the mating antics of the Gray Crowned Crane. The birds are already pretty spectacular, and when you add in the jumping and dancing they do it’s pretty amazing.
My photos of it were kind of rushed and not as good as I’d like because our guide was trying to race us across the valley to see a rhinoceros that was literally just a dark speck in the distance, but the observation is linked above.
A couple of Sternula superciliaris on the right bank of the Tapajós River, a tributary of the Amazon River.
It is pretty much a cliché, but the mating display of the male peafowl is really amazing.
ever seen the mating display of a snake,
https://youtu.be/d4Be3TAjmGM
https://youtu.be/_eohxZBhKKE
Perhaps not beautiful, but impressive….These are displays I used to see very frequently over my patio. A male hummingbird makes a powerful parabolic dive and thwacks his tail to make a big noise for the female who sits back and enjoys the aerobatics.
The coolest ones I’ve seen would be Greater Prairie-Chicken and Whooping Crane.
not wild, but the courting of my peacock gudgeon pair (Tateurndina ocellicauda) is always fun to watch
I think it’s the red-eyed grebe where the courting pair does a coordinately dance where they have to synch to one another’s movements? I thought it was beautiful, and also posed questions in terms of the brain mechanisms that allowed them to synch their movements so.
Oh, so they are displaying in a snipe style!
I thought this White-capped Redstart was so pretty! I had no idea they could show so much ‘red’ and get the tail feathers so high! https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/97523287
Well, mostly she just sits looking available and watches the fellers knock themselves out.
That’s what birds regulary do!.)
Is there a project about mating? Or just a list of mating scenes? I love these couple of Toxomerus flies… https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/20951223
There’s this project, which is now global: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/mating-behaviour
For people in and around South Africa, there’s also https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/mating-pair-s-afr
