Bowerbirds are renowned in the animal kingdom for the elaborate structures, called bowers, that the males build to attract females. The bowers are decorated with colorful objects like flowers, berries, shells, and even human debris. When many people see photos and videos of these complex, aesthetic bowers, they can’t help but ask: are bowerbirds making art?
What is art?
To answer whether bowerbirds are making art, we first need to define what art is. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, art is “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination to produce works appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.”
So for bowerbird bowers to be considered art, they need to demonstrate creativity, skill, imagination, beauty, and emotional impact. Many philosophers argue that intention is also a key component of art – the artist must intentionally create something for aesthetic purposes.
Creativity and imagination
Bowerbirds certainly demonstrate creativity and imagination in their bowers. No two bowers built by the same species of bowerbird are exactly alike. There is lots of room for individual variation. The types of objects used, the colors and patterns, the shape and symmetry of the structure – every bower has its own unique character.
Male bowerbirds also show creativity in selecting, collecting, and arranging the objects that adorn their bowers. They combine natural and artificial materials in novel ways. Sometimes rare or unusual items are incorporated into the design. One bower even contained a sculpture of a beetle made out of green glass – definitely an imaginative piece!
Skill
Constructing a bower requires considerable skill. First, the birds build a sturdy twig infrastructure. Satin bowerbirds, for example, engineer their bowers using a robust frame of interwoven sticks.
The avenue-style bowers of regent bowerbirds have an especially complex architecture with multiple walls and a hut-like turret. This takes engineering know-how to create.
Second, arranging and maintaining the decoration requires dexterity. The birds carefully place each object in a deliberate position. They are constantly re-arranging and editing the embellishments. And they keep their bowers meticulously clean.
Beauty
Evolutionarily, the main purpose of the bowerbirds’ constructions is to attract mates. So do they achieve beauty in their bowers?
Many humans perceive them as beautiful. The colors, shapes, and patterns please our senses. We find the specific asthetic, like the symmetry in a regent bower, visually appealing.
Of course, bowerbird bowers are designed to attract the aesthetic tastes of female bowerbirds, not humans. But interestingly, female bowerbirds do show preferences for specific visual qualities that humans also tend to find attractive.
Experiments where researchers modify bowers show that females strongly favor symmetry, a visual trait humans associate with beauty and health. Females also prefer bowers with bright, contrasting colors over plain or monotone ones. So beauty does seem to be one aim of the bowerbirds’ artistic endeavors.
Emotional impact
What about emotional impact? This criterion is trickier to assess in animals. But we do know that the bowers serve an emotional purpose for bowerbirds – they provide a venue for elaborate courtship rituals that lead up to mating.
The males use dance, song, and mimicry to perform for visiting females at their bowers. This performance conveys excitement and attraction on the male’s part. The female makes a complex evaluation of the male, his bower, and display before deciding to mate. Good bowers help elicit positive emotions and arousal in the females.
So while we can’t definitively say bowerbirds experience emotion the same way humans do, their bowers do succeed in an emotive, romantic purpose similar to much of human art and architecture designed to impress potential mates.
Intention and purpose
The last key question is whether bowerbirds intentionally create art with an aesthetic purpose. Or are bowers simply an instinctual behavior that happens to appeal to our sense of beauty?
This comes back to the ongoing debate about how much awareness animals have about what they are creating. Clearly, male bowerbirds deliberately build bowers to attract mates. But are they consciously creating something they themselves find beautiful or were just instinctually wired to construct something that female bowerbirds would like?
If the sole purpose of bowers was utilitarian, we may conclude the latter. But bowers go beyond the practical need to provide a mating venue. The attention to decorating with colorful, novel, symmetric ornaments does imply bowerbirds have some awareness about the aesthetic appeal of their work. They make choices to create beauty, not just utility.
Still, we can’t definitively say whether bowerbirds have the same artistic intention as humans. But their skills, creativity, and appreciation of visual aesthetics suggest some level of conscious artistry may be going on in their miniature studios.
Insights from neuroscience
Understanding the brain mechanics behind bowerbird artistry may provide more clues into their artistic intentions. Using PET imaging, scientists have studied the neurochemistry of the bowerbird brain while the males were decorating their bowers.
The scans showed activation in the striatofrontal pathways of the brain – the same region active when humans are creating visual art. This suggests a neurobiological similarity in how bowerbirds and humans approach artistic work and aesthetic decision-making.
More brain imaging studies comparing artists and bowerbirds could reveal further insights into the nature and evolution of artistic intention. Do the same thoughts and emotions run through the mind of a painter choosing colors and a bowerbird picking flowers? We don’t know for sure. But the possibility fascinates both scientists and artists.
Conclusion
Given their creative outputs that demonstrate skill, imagination, beauty and emotional purpose, I believe the answer to whether bowerbirds make art is a qualified yes.
We can’t equate their artistic abilities and intentions as identical to ours. But the weight of evidence suggests bowerbirds go beyond purely instinctual behavior. They intentionally enhance the aesthetic allure of their structures to craft something that conveys beauty and creativity to both their kind and to human eyes. In this sense, they fulfill key criteria for being credited with some level of artistry.
Their motivations may be courtship rather than self-expression like most human artists. But understanding more about bowerbird art can still provide valuable evolutionary insight into the origins of our own artistic impulses. Next time you see a bowerbird masterpiece, perceiving it as art created with care, skill and awareness will make you appreciate this avian artists even more.