White-bearded Manakin

• It makes its sounds with its wings, not its voice: it snaps modified wing feathers together more than sixty times a second, a movement faster than a hummingbird's wingbeat, producing a dry crack that sounds like a firecracker.
• The males clear and maintain a court of barely half a square metre on the forest floor for years, removing every leaf that falls, and leap between the vertical stems around it at dizzying speed.

Skeleton type

Vertebrate - internal bony skeleton (bird)

Habitat and environment

Understorey of rainforest, secondary forest and forest edges of tropical America

Birth weight

Altricial: born blind, naked or with sparse down and entirely dependent

Size at birth

Altricial: born blind, naked or with sparse down and entirely dependent

Sexual maturity

3 years

Gestation / incubation

18 days of incubation

Litter / clutch size

2 eggs

Sources consulted: Wikipedia (es): Manacus manacus

Best time: All year round in northern South America, by day; the males display at leks and produce wing snaps that carry a long way.