It’s easy to believe that these graceful, dazzling little birds that dance innocently around flowers wouldn’t hurt a fly. But it turns out that male hummingbirds can be surprisingly belligerent, using their long, sharp beaks as weapons to jab rivals in the throat while fighting over females. Because males and females have evolved different shaped beaks, and better weapons are more likely to win battles, researchers believe that this could be the first example of bills being molded by both natural and sexual selection.
Long-billed hermits (Phaethornis longirostis) are large hummingbirds found in forests in central Mexico all the way down to Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador. They’re generally solitary birds, like most hummingbirds, but the males aggregate and sing together in competitive mating displays called leks. These elaborate rituals also involve tail-waggling and fighting over space. The aim of the game is to maintain the best territory so that once a female enters it, the male can continue to court her with displays and songs before hopefully copulating.
While it’s not unusual for birds to be territorial, these battles piqued the interest of researcher Alejandro Rico-Guevara because he observed that the males would use their bills as swords to stab at their rivals. Male weaponry is rare in birds, so he wondered whether different shaped beaks could confer a mating advantage.
Although it was known that male and female long-billed hermits possessed different shaped beaks, it was presumed that this was likely a result of different feeding habits, which probably served to reduce competition between the sexes.
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