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When it comes to flirting in the bird world, hummingbirds go to great lengths performing spectacular courtship dives to attract female attention.

Broad-tailed hummingbirds (Selasphorus platycercus) fly up to 100 feet in the air before sweeping down toward a perched female, then climb back up for a subsequent dive in the opposite direction.

The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado is home to a population of breeding broad-tailed hummingbirds.

Here researchers from Princeton University have been investigating how hummingbirds combine speed, sound, and color in their displays.

“The dives are truly amazing feats for such small birds,” says Benedict Hogan, a postdoctoral research associate in ecology and evolutionary biology and the study’s lead author.

“We know from previous work that the males can reach really high speeds. They combine that speed with intriguing noises generated by their wing and tail feathers, and of course with their brightly iridescent plumage.”

Courtship Dives

But how do these different components fit together, and what might a dive sound like and look like to a female?

To explore this, Hogan and Mary Caswell Stoddard, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, created video and audio recordings of 48 dives performed by wild male broad-tailed hummingbirds.

Then used image-tracking software to estimate each male’s trajectory and speed throughout the dive.

Combining these estimates with the audio data, the researchers measured the precise time at which the males produce a mechanical “buzz” with their tail feathers.

To incorporate information about iridescent plumage color, which is difficult to extract from the video recordings, the team headed to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Bird’s-eye View

Using a multi-angle imaging technique and an ultraviolet-sensitive camera, they photographed broad-tailed hummingbird specimens.

Hummingbirds are tetrachromatic.

Their eyes have four color cones, one of which is sensitive to ultraviolet wavelengths.

Combining the photographs with a model of hummingbird color vision and details of the U-shaped flight path, the researchers were able to estimate a female “bird’s-eye view” of the male’s iridescent throat feathers.

Putting it all together, Hogan and Stoddard could determine how the events in a hummingbird’s dive unfold.

A male broad-tailed hummingbird climbs upward on the final leg of his U-shaped dive past a would-be mate. Photo by David Inouye, Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory

How the Hummingbird’s Dive Unfolds

“We discovered that the most dramatic aspects of the dive — high speed, the mechanical buzz, and a rapid iridescent color change — happen almost all at once, just before the male soars past the female,” says Stoddard.

“These aerial acrobats deliver an in-your-face sensory explosion.”

First, the male starts the tail-generated buzz.

Then his bright red throat feathers become visible to the female and quickly appear to change to black, due to his speed and orientation.

During this time, the male reaches top horizontal speed.

Because of his high speed, the researchers estimate that a female will perceive an upward and then downward shift in pitch as he approaches and departs.

“This is due to the Doppler effect, the same phenomenon responsible for the perceived change in pitch as a car with its horn blaring drives past you,” says Hogan.

All of these key events occur in a 300-millisecond window, roughly the duration of a human blink.

Male broad-tailed hummingbirds closely time key events to produce a burst of signals for the females they are wooing. They synchronize maximal horizontal speed, loud noises generated with their tail feathers, and a display of their iridescent throat patch (gorget), all in a mere 300 milliseconds — roughly the duration of a human blink. Illustration courtesy of the researchers

Importance of Hummingbird’s Timing and Motion

How much does the timing matter to females?

That needs more study, say the researchers.

For now, they can only hypothesize about the different elements of the dive display.

The tightly synchronized moves might provide information about the male’s health or tap into a female’s aesthetic preferences.

Whatever the explanation, the team emphasized the importance of considering timing and motion in animal courtship signals.

“In the real world, many animals strut their stuff in complex, dynamic ways,” says Stoddard.

“Whether it’s a diving hummingbird or a dancing peacock spider, we need to account for motion and orientation to understand how these remarkable displays evolved.”

“Synchronization of speed, sound and iridescent color in a hummingbird aerial courtship dive,” by Benedict Hogan and Mary Caswell Stoddard, appears in the Dec. 18 issue of Nature Communications.

The research was supported by the Princeton Environmental Institute’s Climate and Energy Grand Challenges Program and a Sloan Research Fellowship to Stoddard.