Decorating Bowers

["Tony Lawson" <>]

There was some recent discussion of decorating bowers.  This was in today's column 8 of the Sydney Morning Herald.

 

"Your item about bowerbirds collecting blue clothes pegs raises the question: however did these birds manage before man invented plastic?" writes Max Spiller, of Bellingen. "I have never seen a natural object in a bowerbird nest. They are always blue, and always man-made." The answer, surely, is that bowerbirds are a very recent species, having evolved in the 1930s to fill an ecological niche created by German industrial chemists.

 

Tony Lawson