Bowerbird Rejects Bottle Cap for Being the Wrong Blue

A satin bowerbird on the edge of a eucalyptus wood has turned down a blue plastic bottle cap for inclusion in his display, describing it, through a series of short clicks and one long disapproving whirr, as the wrong blue. The cap had been found beside a picnic table on Saturday morning. By Saturday afternoon it was lying by a garden shed forty metres away, where the bird is understood to have taken it personally.

The bower in question is a small avenue of upright twigs, built with great care and repaired daily. In front of it lies what the bird calls his collection and what everybody else calls a pile of blue things. It currently includes eleven parrot feathers, four drinking straws, a clothes peg, a fragment of a child's balloon, a single blue flower that is past its best and a biro lid that the bird is said to regard as the centrepiece. Every object is sorted, turned and placed with the seriousness of a museum curator hanging a new wing.

The rejected cap was, by common agreement, very nearly the right blue. It was simply a little too green, in a light that only the bowerbird appears to have noticed. Neighbouring birds were not asked for their opinion. A magpie who watched the inspection from a fence post described the whole business as exhausting, and said she had seen the same bird spend most of a morning moving one straw ten centimetres to the left and then back again.

There was a further, more delicate matter. Two of the straws in the current collection are believed to have come from a rival bower on the other side of the creek, and to have left it without their previous owner's knowledge. Asked about this, the bowerbird declined to comment, rearranged the straws so that they faced away from the creek, and began a long, elaborate song that included a very good impression of a kookaburra.

The display is expected to receive its first visitor of the season within days. She will walk slowly along the avenue, look carefully at every object, listen to the song and the impressions, and then, in all likelihood, leave without saying a word. The bowerbird is said to understand this completely, and has already begun reconsidering the flower.

The truth behind the story is only slightly less strange. Male satin bowerbirds in eastern Australia really do build an avenue of twigs, called a bower, and decorate the ground in front of it with objects, and they have a strong preference for blue. Feathers, berries and flowers are traditional, but in areas near people the birds happily collect pegs, straws, bottle caps and pen lids. The bower is not a nest. It exists only to impress.

Females visit several bowers before choosing a mate, and they inspect the decorations and the male's song and dance closely. Males have been seen stealing ornaments from rivals and wrecking nearby bowers, which makes a fine collection a little like a trophy cabinet. So when a bowerbird fusses over a single straw, he is not being fussy for the sake of it. In his world, taste is everything, and the right shade of blue can decide his whole year.