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For all the enchantment the color blue has cast upon humanity, no animal has fallen under its spell more hopelessly than the bowerbird, whose very survival hinges on blue.
In a small clearing on the forest floor, the male weaves twigs and branches into an elaborate bower, which he decorates exclusively with blue objects — the blue tail-feathers of parakeets, blue flowers and berries, bones and shells so bleached by sun and sea as to appear bluish-white, and, in the past century, various souvenirs from the waste and want of our own species: blue plastic caps, blue candy wrappers, blue strings. These he arranges on a straw platform in the front, where he performs his ecstatic courtship dance whenever a female enters the bower to consider him as a mate.
Unlike the octopus, capable of seeing shades of blue we cannot conceive, bowerbirds have been found to have no optical advantage in perceiving this particular color — they appear simply to like it. It may have to do with how much more impressive it renders the male’s feat: Although we live on a Pale Blue Dot — the consequence of an atmosphere that bends sunlight to make the oceans blue — blue is the rarest color in the living world. Humans have waged wars over indigo and traded fortunes for lapis lazuli. Perhaps the bowerbird recognizes that no color is more precious than blue, and therefore none is more seductive — seduction so ornate and labor-intensive because the stakes of mating are so high: most bowerbird pairings are monogamous, produce very few eggs of enormous size relative to the bird, sometimes just a single one, and the males take an active part in rearing the chicks.
