Meet the only bird that sings with its wings London, June 16
(ANI): The male club-winged manakin, the only bird known to sing
with its wings, contains some secrets of its performance in its
bones, researchers have discovered. It lives in the cloud
forests of Colombia and Ecuador, performs a mate-attracting song
by rubbing its wings together. A Cornell University team from
the US that scanned its bones found that unlike most birds, it
has dense, solid wing bones that help it to emit a violin-like
sound. Lead researcher Kim Bostwick, curator of birds and
mammals at the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates, and her
colleagues carried out CT scans of manakin wings. The scans
revealed that, while most birds have hollow wing bones, the
club-winged manakin's are "bulky and solid". "Birds tend not to
want to carry around a lot of extra weight," the BBC quoted Dr
Bostwick as saying. "[So the fact] that the club-winged manakin
is carrying around such enlarged, solid and densely mineralized
bones, must mean they hav