(Readers will see a lot more noise in these manakin photos than is most of the other bird photos WC posts here. It’s an unavoidable consequence of the very low light, mandatory high shutter speeds, limits of camera technology and simple physics. It’s dark where these birds hang out.)

Sometimes WC wonders about common name conventions for birds. The faint, tiny white band on the tail of the Band-tailed Manakin is the least noticeable feature of this spectacular, tiny bird. In a birder’s binoculars, this species is bright enough to make your eyes water. Red, orange, yellow and black, and as hyperactive on a lek as most other manakins, this bird always makes a birder seeing it for the first time gasp with pleasure.

This is a bird of the várzea, the seasonally flooded lowland forests of the Amazon and other streams and, to a lesser extent, the adjoining gallery forest. The very conspicuous males court the drabber females. This is the only female WC has seen, let alone photographed. She was much more cooperative than her frenzied suitors.

In this case, the lek was about thirty feet off the trail, in the dense, tangled understory vegetation.

This species is very poorly studied. Most of the publicized research is from a single study of 50 or so birds in central Brazil. Their diet is reported to be mostly fruit, supplemented with insects and seeds. WC watched on male hawk insects.

On the lek, one male, the alpha male, defends the territory, while one or more subdominant males, the beta males, participate with the alpha male in performing a complex, coordinated display. For WC, most of the lek was obscured by brush, so trying to watch the behavior was maddening.

Nests are tiny, usually located six meet or so above the ground in the fork of a tree or shrub. There are two eggs, but nothing else about incubation and fledging is known. There are perhaps five subspecies, although it’s also possible some of those are simply color variations.

There are no population studies that WC can find, and like many Amazonian birds, they fall outside the Breeding Bird Survey routes. The species’ territory is large, and while their habitat is shrinking, they are nominally protected by a series of national parks in Brazil, Peru and Ecuador. So the IUCN calls them a species of Least Concern.

They are an absolute treat to see in the field.

For more bird photographs, please visit Frozen Feather Images.