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.
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.
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.
The first that came to my mind was from white wagtails, males are doing everything they can, even sing which is unusual to hear from wagtails, all puff up and make circles around female similar to how pegions do, but on one side.