Club-winged Manakin

The club-winged manakin (Machaeropterus deliciosus) is a small passerine bird in the family Pipridae native to the foothill and lower montane forests of western Colombia and northwestern Ecuador. Males are remarkable for their unique sound-producing mechanism: they possess highly modified secondary flight feathers with thickened, clubbed shafts that they vibrate together at extremely high frequencies (over 100 Hz) to produce a distinctive mechanical song during courtship displays at leks. This makes M. deliciosus one of very few known birds to produce song through wing feather vibration (stridulation) rather than the syrinx. The dense, interlocking barbules of the modified feathers function as a resonating system analogous to a violin string on a bow. Males display at traditional lek sites on low perches in dense forest understory, where females visit to select mates. The species is listed as Least Concern by the IUCN and has a stable population across its limited but continuous range in the humid foothills of northwestern South America. It depends on intact lowland to foothill tropical forest.