Life Lessons from the Vogelkop Bowerbird

By at 2:18 pm Monday, Nov 9

vogelkopbowerbird.jpg

Lesson 1: When choosing gifts for your date, remember that girls prefer flowers to piles of fungus-ridden dung.

You know how some movies or TV shows are painful to watch because you see that a character is making some awkward mistake and you just know it will end horribly? This BBC video is similar. I kept thinking, "No, Mr. Vogelkop Bowerbird! Don't give her that! You'll never get mated!" But, honestly, I was thinking that at the flower-power fellow. Foolishly, I'd assumed that the lesson here was going to be something along the lines of, "Birds like things humans find repugnant and isn't that interesting."

Instead, the lesson turns out to be, "Everybody poops, but that doesn't mean they want to receive it as a gift."

VIDEO: Inside the Love-Den of the Vogelkop Bowerbird, BBC Life

Image courtesy the BBC, via Adam Abu-Nab

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Maggie Koerth-Baker

I do the Twitter, the Google+, and (to a much lesser extent) the Facebook.

Books
• Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.

Upcoming Appearances
• February 20 at British Columbia Sustainable Energy Association — Vancouver. 7:00 pm
• February 29 at University of Minnesota: Frontiers in the Environment seminar
• March 1 at Huge Theater, Minneapolis: The Theater of Public Policy
• March 12 at University of Illinois — Urbana-Champaign
• March 27 at Penn State Institutes on Energy and the Environment
• March 29-31 at York College of Pennsylvania: Writer in residence
• April 2 at MIT: The New GeekSpeak: Science Journalists' New Toolbox, with Eli Kintisch and John Bohannon — Maseeh Hall, 4:00 pm
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs
• April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins — 4:00 pm
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum

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