Father of the Year, Surprisingly.

Mating behaviors in birds quite frequently involved female-mate choice, in which males have elaborate ornamentations, dances, or structures they build and display towards females in order to secure a mating. Bright feathers, long tails, colored feet, and more visually stunning traits are frequently used by males. So I was personally a little intrigued when I heard about Emu mating dances, as Emu’s are really quite dull looking birds.

After clearing the tears from my eyes for laughing so hard at the first video clip I found of this, I must say it is indeed a very interesting mating dance they perform. Not having wings built for flight the dance is mostly consistent of neck swivels, strutting, and occasionally dropping their necks down to the ground and sort of walking a few steps like that.

Here is a video, start it at 0:37 sec for the best display of the dance by both birds and forgive the hokey country music. This was the best, most detailed video of both birds participating I could find.

Besides the highly entertaining visual of watching an essentially wingless bird attempt to jump about while keeping it’s balance, the matching behavior of Emus is actually quite interesting. For about a 2 month span in the winter males will begin the display to the females who are actually slightly larger in size. If she’s impressed with the dance, the male then has mating opportunities for the next 5 months or so until the eggs are laid, if she doesn’t like it she’ll become highly aggressive and chase him off. Female Emus who do choose a mate will actually guard that male against other females, as the species is promiscuous. Quite the role reversal from what we normally observe in birds. Even more interesting is that the eggs are incubated by the male, the mother generally leaving and only occasionally returning to check in on the brood and incubating male. After hatching, the males continue to rear the chicks and guard them, quite aggressively, from other birds (even the mother of the chicks if he’s really protective).

Males taking charge of chick-rearing is not nearly as common in birds, where the majority of species involve either bi-parental care or solitary females rearing the offspring for the chicks to survive. Infanticide by males is also fairly common in birds, yet here we see males building nests, incubating eggs entirely on their own, and then protecting and feeding chicks for 7 months after hatching. For a rather dull looking bird who to be quite honest looks like he’s having an epileptic fit while trying to impress females, they actually display a rare level of male-parental care when it comes to offspring.