Drag queening for the birds say Spanish boffins Priscilla, Queen
of the Raptors Fetch out the sequins: Spanish biologists working
in western France have explained a curious characteristic of a
bird called the marsh harrier: some males “dress” as females in
their permanent plumage to win chicks and territory. The
boffins, led by Audrey Sternalski of the Instituto de
Investigacion en Recursos Cingeticos in Ciudad Real, say that
the female-coloured male harriers are able to avoid copping the
aggression that’s typical of males defending their territory.
The researchers set up decoy birds with three plumage styles:
the grey of the male, the brown-and-white of the female, and the
imperfect mimicked plumage of the “she-male”. They found that
aggressive males focused on attacking decoys that were typically
male, making less effort to try and drive the other two off
their territory. This, they argue in a paper published in the
Royal Society’s Biology Letters, gives the males-in-female-
plumage a chance to cozy up to fe