Birds Gettin' It.

It's mating ritual time again. And I don't know if you've watched the birds try to score, but it's pretty interesting. A lot of male birds do something along the same theme -- dance while the female watches.

Cassin's Kingbirds are the most interesting to me. They appear to dance together in midair, vertically, him and her, screeching and flapping their wings for a few seconds. Then they fly to the next tree and do it again. Here's a picture I took of them doing their thing a couple of years ago:
Everyone's probably heard about hummingbirds. The male starts at about 2' off the ground, and zooms up at about a 15-degree curved trajectory to about 60' like an F-14 fighter on full afterburner. Then he blasts back down the exact same trajectory, still at a breakneck speed. One round trip takes about 1/2 a second -- Up, down. Zoom, zoom. Zoom, zoom. He keeps doing that until he gets tired. I've seen this display lots of times.

But yesterday I saw something new. I saw a male hummingbird do a hoverdance about 4' off the ground. He acted like he was tied to the end of a string, and someone at the other end was swinging him back and forth slowly. She watched from about 4" off the ground, hovering and keeping herself facing towards him the whole time.

But I also saw something else new yesterday on the way home from work that surprised me. Even crows do this! The prospective female was more reticent than the other birds, as she perched attentive but unmoving, at the very top of a tall ponderosa pine. The male flew around in the air above her, perhaps more like an ungainly clodhopper than a hip-hop star. Still, I think she was digging him.

So I'm wondering -- do they all do it? It might be too late to find out this year. It's the end of the week, and I think the birds have already decided who they're going to shack up with. But I'll pay more attention next year.

I'd like to hear about what you've seen.

Update (Sunday): I saw a new dance. Two Barn Swallows. They flew randomly, yet completely in tune with each other. Squawking and dancing apart, then together. Sometimes touching, sometimes not.