Lionel asks me about the mating calls of insects, but definitely in a more discrete way.

But then I felt really guilty because after I stopped he stuck around somewhere nearby for about 30 mins calling with no response. And I realised that while I had been enjoying ‘talking’ to an owl, he’s busy looking for a lady friend and I had totally lead him on and abandon him for no reason.

I mean, there’s nothing I can do about it now. I’m not a lady owl. But I definitely feel guilty about the whole thing.

Among the first things that stand out about golden-collared manakins, a bird found in Panama and western Colombia, are the acrobatics of male adults during breeding season. Males also emit a particular call, the 'chee-poo', to attract females. In a new paper published in Animal Behaviour, Smithsonian researchers Ioana Chiver and Barney Schlinger explore the role of androgens—male hormones—in the expression of this vocal behavior, by administering testosterone to females and juvenile males.

In previous research by these scientists, testosterone implants motivated juvenile males to perform all the courtship acrobatics of male adults, while females performed some of them. Thanks to video recordings of these behaviors, she was able to extract the vocalizations made by female manakins and juvenile males that were administered testosterone. She then compared them to the vocalizations of untreated females, untreated juvenile males, as well as adult males in the wild.

When implanted with testosterone, female manakins were able to produce the male-specific 'chee-poo' vocalization, while untreated females were not. This may indicate that the neuromuscular systems associated with this mating call are present in the females or that they can be quickly developed in response to a male hormone, such as testosterone.

In the breeding season, the male kākāpō can inflate like a balloon and emit a low ‘sonic’ boom which, in mountainous terrain, can be heard up to five kilometres away.