Excitement

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  For some reason—a reason that I would not understand until years later—there were many more males in the flock than females. Among the two dozen or so birds, there were only five or six females. I was enjoying the scene, watching them as they dove underwater to feed and then popped back up to the surface, when suddenly a male thrust his head upward and then snapped it back to touch his rump—a display known as the head throw. With his head in this awkward position, he briefly opened his beak toward the sky, after which he brought his head back to its normal position with a slight side-to-side waggle. Soon, other males joined in, and the males in the flock were boiling over with bravado, jockeying for position around the females, and chasing each other. If I had been closer to the action that day, I would have heard the raspy two-note call the male Goldeneye makes during the head-throw display. The male Goldeneyes performed various other displays, too, which have been given suitably nautical names like the bowsprit and the masthead. The bowsprit involves cruising around with the head and beak pointed up and forward, while the masthead is performed with the head raised, then lowered and cast forward along the surface of the water. Despite the freezing weather, this gathering of Goldeneyes was engaged in courtship displays. They would continue wooing the females with these displays throughout the winter months, before returning to their nesting grounds on wooded lakes in northern Canada. That memorable outing was my introduction into the complex social world of ducks. Across the entire waterfowl family, males engage in similarly showy courtship behavior. The displays vary among species, but they generally consist of a series of highly distinctive postures and gestures, each lasting only a few seconds. The males may repeat them over and over, but the basic elements are pretty simple, and because almost all duck displays take place on the water, they always involve a lot of churning, cruising, and splashing. [image "The head-throw display sequence of the male Common Goldeneye." file=image_rsrc3NE.jpg] The head-throw display sequence of the male Common Goldeneye.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was the half-hour after closing time and the narrow grid of Soho was rowdy with people, some shutting up shop, some stumbling from pubs, and others performing the awkward, drunken transition from one place of amusement to another, where money would pour off them into the early hours of the morning. There was a small crowd outside the Shaft, a gaggle of excited boys, and others waiting, staring challengingly at the arrivals. The thump of the music, like some powerful creature barely contained, came up out of the ground and gathered around us as we went in at the door. On the stairs it began to be really loud, the whole foundations humming with the bass while a thrilling electronic rinse of high-pitched noise set the ears tingling. From now on talk would be shouting, or confidences made with lips and tongue pressed close to the ear: we would be hoarse from our intimacies. The medium of the place was black music, and even the double-jointed spareness of reggae came over the dance floor like a whiplash. At the foot of the stairs, in his pink-bulbed cubbyhole, Denys took our money. ‘Hey Willy, I thought you was dead, man.’ ‘I’ve been resurrected, just for tonight.’ He grinned. ‘Whatever did happen to your nose, eh?’ I pinched the broken bridge with my fingers. ‘Ooh, a bit of trouble with some boys—a bit of rough, you might say.’ ‘Well, you take care, man—because you, are, pretty. ’ He fluttered his long lashes, but kept the straightest of faces. ‘And I hope you will have a pleasant evening too sir,’ he said to Phil, who thanked him apprehensively. So we passed on, waved in to the pounding semi-darkness by the impassive Horace, whose twenty-stone bulk, toiling and yet stately in a Hawaiian short-sleeved shirt, was reflected in floor-length mirrors that flanked the door and repeated him ad infinitum , like exotic statuary surrounding a temple. The mirrors and pink lights were reminders that this place, which to me was purely and simply the Shaft, was other things for other people on the intervening days and nights. Indeed, the club went back a bit and under different names had been a modish Sixties dive and before that a seedy bohemian haunt with a pianist and alcoholics. The décor, of what was essentially an arched, brick-walled cellar, was correspondingly eclectic, the bar overhung by a thatched roof, and the sitting-out area screened from the dance floor by a huge tank of flickering tropical fish. On first acquaintance these features seemed hideous or absurd, and gave me the sinister feeling that nightlife was still run by an elderly, nocturnal, Soho mafia who actually thought such details were smart. Soon, though, they became camp adornments to the whole experience, and I wouldn’t have had them changed for the world. The heavy hotness of the day, which had begun to drain from the streets, was redoubled in the thickly crowded club.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  My own work was profoundly shaped by those weekly discussions in the early 1980s. I became fascinated by phylogenetic methods and eager to reconstruct avian family trees. For my senior honors project, I worked on the phylogeny and biogeography of toucans and barbets. Working at a desk I made for myself on a big table beneath the towering skeleton of an extinct moa in room 507 of the bird collection, I was excited to make observations of toucan plumage and skeletal characters and to construct my first phylogenies. I am happy to say that I have been continuously associated with world-class scientific collections of birds ever since. Only, I don’t smell like mothballs anymore. As graduation approached, I was casting about for what to do next, searching for a research program that would combine my bird-watching skills and passion with my new obsession with avian phylogeny. Before going on to graduate school, I was desperate to get to South America and to see more of the birds I had met in the drawers at the MCZ. (There were very few tropical bird field guides in those days, so browsing through a museum collection was actually the best way to learn about the birds before actually seeing them in real life.) Intrigued by the Harvard graduate student Jonathan Coddington’s research using the phylogeny of spiders to test hypotheses about the evolution of orb-web-weaving behavior, I wanted to make a similar use of phylogeny to study the evolution of bird behavior. At about that time, I met Kurt Fristrup, a Harvard graduate student, who had worked on the behavior of the flamboyantly orange Guianan Cock-of-the-Rock (Rupicola rupicola, Cotingidae) (color plate 5), one of the planet’s most amazing birds. Kurt suggested, “Why don’t you go to Suriname to map manakin leks?” In retrospect, this was one of the most consequential pieces of professional advice I ever received. — On a thin branch twenty-five feet high in the sun-dappled understory of a tropical rain forest in Suriname perches a tiny glossy black bird with a brilliantly golden yellow head, bright white eyes, and ruby-red thighs—a male Golden-headed Manakin (Ceratopipra erythrocephala) (color plate 6). He weighs about a third of an ounce (ten grams), or a bit less than two U.S. quarters. He has a short neck and short tail, giving him a compact body, but he has a nervous energy that belies his almost dumpy appearance. He sings a high, soft, descending whistled puuu and peers intently around, hyperaware of his surroundings. In moments, a second male whistles back from his perch in an adjacent tree, and then a third nearby. The male answers immediately. His social environment is obviously the focus of his keen attention. In all, there are five males clustered together in the forest. They are obscured from one another by foliage, but they are all within earshot of each other.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  My real intellectual goal was to find the virtually unknown White-throated Manakin (Corapipo gutturalis) and the White-fronted Manakin (Lepidothrix serena), which were both reported to occur at the Brownsberg. The male White-throated Manakin is a deep, glossy iridescent blue-black color with an elegant snowy-white throat patch that extends down the breast in a pointed V-shape (color plate 8). The species was so poorly known that it had been left out of François Haverschmidt’s Birds of Surinam, published in 1968, but birders had recently reported it from the Brownsberg. In contrast, the male White-fronted Manakin is a velvety black with a royal-blue rump, a snowy-white forehead, a banana-yellow belly, and an orange-yellow spot on its black breast (color plate 9). Very little was known about the species in the wild. Finding a specific bird species among the hundreds of species in a tropical rain forest is a real challenge. At the time, the songs of the White-fronted and White-throated Manakins had not been described for science, and no recordings were available. The only way to find these birds was to persistently bird-watch my way through the entire avifauna until I found them. This method consisted of going out every day, listening for new bird songs, tracking them down, identifying them, learning them, and adding them to my growing mental catalog of bird sounds that were not the manakins I was looking for. Of course, this was still spectacularly exciting, because virtually all the birds were new to me. Along the way, I would find legendary neotropical birds like the Ornate Hawk-Eagle (Spizaetus ornatus), the Crimson Topaz (Topaza pella) hummingbird, the Variegated Antpitta (Grallaria varia), the Sharpbill (Oxyruncus cristatus), the White-throated Peewee (Contopus albogularis), the Red-and-black Grosbeak (Periporphyrus erythromelas), and the Blue-backed Tanager (Cyanicterus cyanicterus). But the checklist of the birds of Brownsberg listed over three hundred species. So, if I wanted to find the two manakins that were my focus, I had my work cut out for me. At the end of the first week, I found my first territorial male White-fronted Manakin just off a trail on the flattop of the Brownsberg. The advertisement song of this species turned out to be one of the least impressive of all the manakins. It is a single, simple whreeep note with the casual, rolling, froggy richness of a brief toot on a police whistle. In my notes from that first day of discovery, I described the song as a “short, sporadic farty trill.” The display repertoire of the White-fronted Manakin turned out to be relatively simple, too—on the vanilla end of the diversity in manakin aesthetics. The main male display consists of a series of to-and-fro flights about two feet above the ground, which take him back and forth between thin, vertical saplings that surround a central “court” about a yard wide.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  The epiphany came during a visit to an American university a few years ago as I described my views on the evolution of sexual ornaments to a fellow evolutionary biologist over lunch. After every few sentences, my host interrupted me with an objection or two, each of which I answered before I got back to outlining my view. Toward the end of the lunch, when I had finally managed to give a full explanation of my views on evolution by mate choice, he cried out, “But that’s nihilism!” Somehow, what I thought of as a powerful and awe-inspiring explanation of the diversity of ornament in the natural world, my evolutionary colleague saw as a bleak worldview that, should he adopt it, would deprive him of any sense of purpose or meaning in life. After all, if mate choice results in the evolution of ornaments that are merely beautiful, rather than being indicators of mate quality, doesn’t that mean that the universe is not rational? At this moment, I realized why it was necessary to embrace Darwin’s aesthetic perspective on evolution and explain it to a wider audience. My scientific view has grown directly from my experience of the natural world as a bird-watcher and natural historian and from my work as a scientific researcher—connaissance and savoir. This work has given me enormous intellectual and personal pleasure. Never in my career have I been more excited and inspired to do science. I get goose bumps just thinking about the evolution of avian beauty. But this same worldview would seem to deny some of my professional colleagues any reason to get out of bed in the morning. In this book, I will try to explain why I think this more subtle, less deterministic view of evolution provides a richer, more accurate, and more scientific understanding of nature than the common adaptationist view. When we look at evolution through sexual selection, we see a world of freedom and choice that is deeply thrilling—a world of greater beauty than can possibly be accounted for without it. [image file=image_rsrc3MH.jpg] CHAPTER 1Darwin’s Really Dangerous IdeaAdaptation by natural selection is among the most successful and influential ideas in the history of science, and rightly so. It unifies the entire field of biology and has had a profound influence on many other disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, economics, sociology, and even the humanities. The singular genius behind the theory of natural selection, Charles Darwin, is at least as famous as his most famous idea.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Because the male Pin-tailed Manakins look entirely different from the male Golden-winged and White-throated Manakins, these three species had never been hypothesized to be closely related. However, as I read the Snows’ descriptions of the display repertoire of the Pin-tailed Manakin, I could see that many of its elements resembled the behaviors of Golden-winged and White-throated Manakins, and I was certain that the Pin-tailed Manakin was closely related to the Golden-winged and White-throated Manakins. By including the Pin-tailed Manakin in my analysis, I was able to resolve many outstanding questions about the evolution of the behavioral repertoires of the Golden-winged and White-throated Manakins. By comparing all three species, I could identify which display behaviors had evolved in the common ancestor of all three species, which behavior novelties had evolved in the exclusive ancestor of the Golden-winged and White-throated Manakins, and which behavioral elements had evolved uniquely in each of the three species. For example, I first considered the evolution of the male display sites. Most manakins display on thin tree branches. Golden-winged and White-throated Manakins are unique in the family in displaying on mossy fallen logs on the forest floor. Pin-tailed Manakins, on the other hand, display on upper surfaces of thick horizontal branches of trees, which are basically like living logs up in the trees. So, it appears that displaying on thick branches evolved in the common ancestor of all three species from the thin perches of ancestral manakins. Then displaying on fallen logs or buttress roots evolved subsequently in the exclusive common ancestor of the Golden-winged and White-throated Manakins. Another trait I examined was the tail-pointing posture. On their thick display branches, Pin-tailed Manakins perform a tail-pointing posture that is homologous with the Golden-winged Manakin’s but doesn’t resemble anything the White-throated male does. Thus, I concluded that the tail-pointing posture had evolved in the common ancestor of all three species but was lost in the White-throated Manakin lineage and replaced by the novel bill-pointing posture. [image "The tail-pointing display of the male Pin-tailed Manakin." file=image_rsrc3N1.jpg] The tail-pointing display of the male Pin-tailed Manakin. By thoroughly comparing the behaviors of all three species, I developed a comprehensive hypothesis of the history of behavioral diversification in the group. The display repertoires of each species had included physical, vocal, and display elements and had evolved in many creative ways: by insertion of entirely novel elements into the repertoire; by the elaboration of current elements in new ways; and by the combinations of elements and the loss of ancestral elements. I was able to propose an entirely new hierarchical view of the coevolutionary history of manakin beauty.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  The courtship of the White-throated Manakin was only known from a brief note published in the British ornithological journal the Ibis in 1949, which described a single anecdotal observation by T. A. W. Davis. One morning in nearby British Guiana, Davis saw a group of males and “females” consorting together. (Davis did not consider whether any of these green “females” could actually have been young males.) He observed some remarkable male displays and even saw a pair copulating on a mossy fallen log on the forest floor. The displays included a posture with the bill pointed upward, revealing the white throat, and another with the wings held open and the male moving across the log in a “slow undulating crawl.” No one had ever reported a display like this in any other manakin species, and I was desperate to see it for myself. One day in mid-October, I descended the slopes of the mountain to lower-altitude forests along the Irene Val Trail, named for the lovely Irene Waterfall. It was an active morning in a very birdy tropical forest. At one point, I heard a whooshing sound immediately by my head. At first, I thought I might have been dive-bombed by a hummingbird, but when I looked up, I was surprised to see a male White-throated Manakin perched on a branch immediately above the trail. I then realized that I had just stepped over a large log that was lying in the middle of the trail. Intrigued by the possibility that I had interrupted him in mid-display, I backed off the trail to use the forest foliage as a temporary blind. Immediately, the male flew back down to the log in the trail with a rapid flurry of whirring wings, bounding leaps, popping noises, and squeaky calls. The first male was soon joined by two other adult males and two immature males—which were identifiable by their mostly green, female-like plumage and black, Zorro-like face masks. Within the space of a few minutes, I saw more White-throated Manakin displays than T. A. W. Davis had in 1949, and I knew that I had a great scientific opportunity ahead. In the months that followed, I would spend dozens of days observing the White-throated Manakins and, in the process, get totally hooked on studying lek behavior.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Please turn it off.’ He fairly jabbed down the button, and I could see him forcing back a reasonable riposte and remembering to be tolerant of me. He sat with his head bowed, until I reached down and stroked the side of his neck, pulling his chin back, and running my fingers over his face. When my palm covered his mouth, he kissed it slightly, and I was perhaps forgiven. ‘No telly today,’ I said. ‘I’m going to read to you. Please excuse my temporary lisp. Our hero is just arriving at Port Said, with him three rather keen young men, Harrap, Fryer and, um, Stearn; all are wearing panama hats and too many clothes. The date, September 12, 1923.’ We were all jolly stirred, though we showed it in different ways. Harrap was particularly struck, & gasped ‘I say, I say’ over & over, taking his hat off & then prudently putting it back on again. I imagine he’ll say ‘I say, I say’ quite a lot more as Africa offers up its wonders. Not that the landfall itself is in the least remarkable: we had shuffled along in & out of sight of land for the last day or more, but it gave nothing of itself away: a certain amount of traffic evidently going in & out of Alex, & smallish freighters passing near enough for us to see our first Africans. Their lack of any sense of occasion was infinitely touching & humbling. Here was your fellah at his changeless labours—and us Englishmen, coming to rule & to help, so young & calm. I was in the most delirious mixture of silliness & solemnity, & as we approached the entrance to the Canal, & saw the cranes on the docks, the frankly undistinguished buildings, soldiers too as we drew closer, & crowds in djellabas somehow indifferent & yet in a flurry at our arrival, Oxford and England and Poppy seemed almost giddily remote. The heat was rocketing up all the time of course, & when the ship finally stopped moving, & we stood along the rail disdaining to wave at the children & waiting for the gangway to be lowered, it slammed in our faces for the first time. We had 12 hours here while refuelling took place, and I was so much looking forward to it that I cd hardly bring myself to go ashore, & had to think hard about deadly serious things to keep myself from grinning like a fool as I went at a canter down the virtually perpendicular gangplank & shot into the melee of people.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was not until we had passed through the desert of Lancaster Gate and Queensway that there was a major upheaval; at Notting Hill Gate the seat beside mine became empty and the remarkable and inevitable thing happened, as my older admirer, smirking and hesitating, seemed about to take the seat beside me, and the boy from the Corry, materialising suddenly in front of me, and appearing as it were in second place, managed to slip by, almost risking having the older man sit on his lap, and occupied the seat towards which his rival was already lowering his suited rump. Confusion and apology were inadmissible in so bold an action, and he wisely comported himself as if there had never been any question of anyone but him sitting beside me. I drummed my fingers on my knees, and turned to him with a slow, sly grin. The other man’s face grew clenched and red, and he barged away to another part of the car. Only thirty seconds or so were left before we reached Holland Park, though I could decide, as I had done on occasion before, to stick with somebody I was cruising right through to a station miles beyond my own, where, if the cruise was unsuccessful, I might find myself marooned in a distant suburb, with boys mending their push-bikes on the front paths, shouts of far-off footballers on the breeze, and beyond, the fields and woods of semi-country. So, as the train began to slow up, I tentatively gathered Charles’s bag to me in a hint, which was reversible if need be, that my stop was next. I was relieved to see, while we agreed that the Corry was indeed too crowded these days, that he also bent forward, ready to stand up. As we elbowed our way out and started along the platform I spotted my other suitor again, savouring the last seconds he might ever see me, and looking almost nauseous as the train pulled away past us and bore him off. ‘Do you live round here, then?’ I said to the boy, across another funny kind of distance. ‘Not exactly, no,’ he said, with something complacent about him that brought back to me my original impression that he wasn’t very nice. I smiled interrogatively. ‘I thought I might come and check out your place, actually,’ he explained.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  We were all jolly stirred, though we showed it in different ways. Harrap was particularly struck, & gasped ‘I say, I say’ over & over, taking his hat off & then prudently putting it back on again. I imagine he’ll say ‘I say, I say’ quite a lot more as Africa offers up its wonders. Not that the landfall itself is in the least remarkable: we had shuffled along in & out of sight of land for the last day or more, but it gave nothing of itself away: a certain amount of traffic evidently going in & out of Alex, & smallish freighters passing near enough for us to see our first Africans. Their lack of any sense of occasion was infinitely touching & humbling. Here was your fellah at his changeless labours—and us Englishmen, coming to rule & to help, so young & calm. I was in the most delirious mixture of silliness & solemnity, & as we approached the entrance to the Canal, & saw the cranes on the docks, the frankly undistinguished buildings, soldiers too as we drew closer, & crowds in djellabas somehow indifferent & yet in a flurry at our arrival, Oxford and England and Poppy seemed almost giddily remote. The heat was rocketing up all the time of course, & when the ship finally stopped moving, & we stood along the rail disdaining to wave at the children & waiting for the gangway to be lowered, it slammed in our faces for the first time. We had 12 hours here while refuelling took place, and I was so much looking forward to it that I cd hardly bring myself to go ashore, & had to think hard about deadly serious things to keep myself from grinning like a fool as I went at a canter down the virtually perpendicular gangplank & shot into the melee of people. I longed to look at them & shake their outstretched, begging, greeting hands, instead of marching implacably through, as we had to. Custom dictated that we go to Simon Artz’s emporium to buy our sola topis; Fryer and I stood wearing them in front of a huge dim mirror, which made us look very historic, and rather silly. I found mine uncomfortable, & was afraid it suddenly drew all the character out of my face & turned me into just another hard-hatted, heavy-handed empire-builder.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  I first heard the wing songs of the Club-winged Manakin in 1985 on our first morning at El Placer, where Ann and I discovered the lovely and unexpected log dances of the Golden-winged Manakin. Among all the sounds in the busy morning chorus coming from the mossy forest that day, I thought at first that these odd electronic notes might be the musical musings of a parrot—a brief, half-heard snippet of the highly variable, quiet, warbling chatter that parrots sometimes sing to one another while perched in close-knit groups. Later that day, I was stunned to discover that this sound came from inside the forest understory and was made by the legendary, and poorly known, Club-winged Manakin. In the coming weeks, during our searches for additional Golden-winged Manakin territories, we found a few leks of Club-wings in the same forests, and I gorged myself on watching them and tape-recording their contorted musical performances. The wing songs are a major component of the lek display of the species. Indeed, unlike other manakins, male Club-winged Manakins have a greatly reduced vocal repertoire and no vocal advertisement song. One very simple vocalization—a series of sharp keah notes—is produced during its crouching display. At El Placer, we caught Club-winged Manakins in the same mist nets we used to capture the Golden-winged Manakins for color banding. The wing feathers of female Club-wings were normal in every way, but the inner secondary flight feathers of the adult males—the feathers that attach to the trailing upper forewing bone called the ulna—were truly bizarre. Indeed, they had been illustrated in 1860 by the British ornithologist Philip Lutley Sclater in his description of the species. Sclater’s illustrations were reproduced by Darwin in the section of his Descent of Man on the instrumental music of birds, in which Darwin hypothesized that the mechanical sounds of manakins and other birds evolved by mate choice. Specifically, the male Club-winged Manakin’s fifth, sixth, and seventh secondary feathers (counting inward from the wrist) have greatly thickened, swollen central shafts, or rachises. At the tip, sixth and seventh secondaries form twisted knobs, like the handles on the tops of tiny shillelaghs, or the tips of misshapen soft-serve ice cream cones. In contrast, the fifth secondary feather has a sharp forty-five-degree bend near its tip that creates a smooth blade pointing inward toward the body.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Inspired by Coddington’s revolutionary spider research and Fristrup’s helpful suggestion, I headed off in the fall of 1982 to the nation of Suriname, a small, culturally Caribbean, former Dutch colony in northeastern South America, for what turned out to be a five-month sojourn in search of manakins. In Suriname, I worked at the Brownsberg National Park, a fifteen-hundred-foot-high, table-topped mountain covered in tropical rain forest, which is just a few hours south of the capital city of Paramaribo, down red dirt roads. Within a couple days of observing my first Golden-headed Manakins, I also found the White-bearded Manakin (Manacus manacus). One morning while walking through the young secondary forest along the main road through the park, I heard a sharp snap within a shrubby thicket, which sounded like a tiny popgun or a toy firecracker. In the thick shrubs along the road edge, I spied a boldly plumaged White-bearded Manakin (color plate 7). The male of the species has a black crown, back, wings, and tail and bright white underparts that extend in a collar around his nape. Perched only a yard above the ground, this male gave a loud chee-poo call, which was quickly answered by another male a few yards away. Unlike the Golden-headed, the White-bearded Manakin displays on and near the forest floor, and the males cluster closely together in tiny display territories within a few yards of each other. After I waited patiently for a few minutes, a flurry of displays suddenly broke out. The first male flew down to a small court—that is, a patch of bare dirt on the forest floor about a yard wide—and began to bounce rapidly back and forth between small saplings around the edges of the court. Each flight was punctuated by a sharp Snap! that is made by the wing feathers. When perched, his body was transformed. The previously smooth white feathers of his throat were now fluffed out and forward to form a puffy white beard that extended beyond the tip of his bill. Soon several males were all snapping and calling simultaneously. When perching, the males would occasionally make a sudden, explosive, and rapid series of snaps so quickly that they blurred together in a flatulent Bronx cheer. As suddenly as the excitement started, the wave of displays ended, and the lek quieted down to a few chee-pooos, with long waits in between. Unlike the elegant flight and perch displays of the Golden-headed Manakins, the White-bearded Manakin displays are rowdy and rambunctious. The males are packed together, hopping and popping vigorously. White-bearded Manakin males are like buff gymnasts, executing short flights and rebounds with muscular precision.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I mustered up all of my courage and turned to her. “Hey, Valentine’s Day is coming up, and I was wondering, would you be my valentine?” “Yes. I’ll be your valentine.” And then, under the golden arches, we kissed. It was my first time ever kissing a girl. It was just a peck, our lips touched for only a few seconds, but it set off explosions in my head. […] Something had awakened. […] I waited and waited. Finally Maylene showed up and walked over to me. I was about to say “Happy Valentine’s Day!” when she stopped me and said, “Oh, hi, Trevor. Um, listen, I can’t be your girlfriend anymore. Lorenzo asked me to be his valentine and I can’t have two valentines, so I’m his girlfriend now and not yours.”

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  The talent show was in this little community hall attached to nothing in the middle of nowhere. When we got there, Tom was going around, shaking hands, chatting with everybody. There was singing, dancing, some poetry. Then the host got up onstage and said, “Re na le modiragatsi yo o kgethegileng. Ka kopo amogelang…Spliff Star!” “We’ve got a special performer, a rapper all the way from America. Please welcome…Spliff Star!” Spliff Star was Busta Rhymes’s hype man at the time. I sat there, confused. What? Spliff Star? In Hammanskraal? Then everyone in the room turned and looked at me. Tom walked over and whispered in my ear. “Dude, come up onstage.” “What?” “Come onstage.” “Dude, what are you talking about?” “Dude, please, you’re gonna get me in so much shit. They’ve already paid me the money.” “Money? What money?” Of course, what Tom had failed to tell me was that he’d told these people he was bringing a famous rapper from America to come and rap in their talent show. He had demanded to be paid up front for doing so, and I, in my Timberlands, was that famous American rapper. “Screw you,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.” “Please, dude, I’m begging you. Please do me this favor. Please. There’s this girl here, and I wanna get with her, and I told her I know all these rappers…Please. I’m begging you.” “Dude, I’m not Spliff Star. What am I gonna do?!” “Just rap Busta Rhymes songs.” “But I don’t know any of the lyrics.” “It doesn’t matter. These people don’t speak English.” “Aw, fuck.” I got up onstage and Tom did some terrible beat-boxing—“Bff ba-dff, bff bff ba-dff”—while I stumbled through some Busta Rhymes lyrics that I made up as I went along. The audience erupted with cheers and applause. An American rapper had come to Hammanskraal, and it was the most epic thing they had ever seen. So that’s Tom. One afternoon Tom came by my house and we started talking about the dance. I told him I didn’t have a date, couldn’t get a date, and wasn’t going to get a date. “I can get you a girl to go with you to the dance,” he said. “No, you can’t.” “Yes, I can. Let’s make a deal.” “I don’t want one of your deals, Tom.” “No, listen, here’s the deal. If you give me a better cut on the CDs I’m selling, plus a bunch of free music for myself, I’ll come back with the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen in your life, and she’ll be your date for the dance.” “Okay, I’ll take that deal because it’s never going to happen.” “Do we have a deal?” “We have a deal, but it’s not going to happen.” “But do we have a deal?” “It’s a deal.”

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I didn’t know the first thing about having a girlfriend. I had to be taught the whole love bureaucracy of the school. There was the thing where you don’t actually talk straight to the person. You have your group of friends and she has her group of friends, and your group of friends has to go to her group of friends and say, “Okay, Trevor likes Maylene. He wants her to be his valentine. We’re in favor. We’re ready to sign off with your approval.” Her friends say, “Okay. Sounds good. We have to run it by Maylene.” They go to Maylene. They consult. They tell her what they think. “Trevor says he likes you. We’re in favor. We think you’d be good together. What do you say?” Maylene says, “I like Trevor.” They say, “Okay. Let’s move forward.” They come back to us. “Maylene says she approves and she’s waiting for Trevor’s Valentine’s Day advance.” The girls told me this process was what needed to happen. I said, “Cool. Let’s do it.” The friends sorted it out, Maylene got on board, and I was all set. The week before Valentine’s, Maylene and I were walking home together, and I was trying to get up the courage to ask her. I was so nervous. I’d never done anything like it. I already knew the answer; her friends had told me she’d say yes. It’s like being in Congress. You know you have the votes before you go to the floor, but it’s still difficult because anything could happen. I didn’t know how to do it, all I knew was I wanted it to be perfect, so I waited until we were standing outside McDonald’s. Then I mustered up all of my courage and turned to her. “Hey, Valentine’s Day is coming up, and I was wondering, would you be my valentine?” “Yes. I’ll be your valentine.” And then, under the golden arches, we kissed. It was my first time ever kissing a girl. It was just a peck, our lips touched for only a few seconds, but it set off explosions in my head. Yes! Oh, yes. This. I don’t know what this is, but I like it. Something had awakened. And it was right outside McDonald’s, so it was extra special. Now I was truly excited. I had a valentine. I had a girlfriend. I spent the whole week thinking about Maylene, wanting to make her Valentine’s Day as memorable as I could. I saved up my pocket money and bought her flowers and a teddy bear and a card. I wrote a poem with her name in the card, which was really hard because there aren’t many good words that rhyme with Maylene. (Machine? Ravine? Sardine?) Then the big day came. I got my Valentine’s card and the flowers and the teddy bear and got them ready and took them to school.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I went to my mom and begged her to give me money to buy something to wear for the dance. She finally relented and gave me 2,000 rand, for one outfit. It was the most money she’d ever given me for anything in my life. I told Bongani how much I had to spend, and he said we’d make it work. The trick to looking rich, he told me, is to have one expensive item, and for the rest of the things you get basic, good- looking quality stuff. The nice item will draw everyone’s eye, and it’ll look like you’ve spent more than you have. In my mind nothing was cooler than the leather coats everybody wore in The Matrix. The Matrix came out while I was in high school and it was my favorite movie at the time. I loved Neo. In my heart I knew: I am Neo. He’s a nerd. He’s useless at everything, but secretly he’s a badass superhero. All I needed was a bald, mysterious black man to come into my life and show me the way. Now I had Bongani, black, head shaved, telling me, “You can do it. You’re the one.” And I was like, “Yes. I knew it.” I told Bongani I wanted a leather coat like Keanu Reeves wore, the ankle-length black one. Bongani shut that down. “No, that’s not practical. It’s cool, but you’ll never be able to wear it again.” He took me shopping and we bought a calf-length black leather jacket, which would look ridiculous today but at the time, thanks to Neo, was very cool. That alone cost 1,200 rand. Then we finished the outfit with a pair of simple black pants, suede square-toed shoes, and a cream-white knitted sweater. Once we had the outfit, Bongani took a long look at my enormous Afro. I was forever trying to get the perfect 1970s Michael Jackson Afro. What I had was more Buckwheat: unruly and impossible to comb, like stabbing a pitchfork into a bed of crabgrass. “We need to fix that fucking hair,” Bongani said. “What do you mean?” I said. “This is just my hair.” “No, we have to do something.” Bongani lived in Alexandra. He dragged me there, and we went to talk to some girls from his street who were hanging out on the corner. “What would you do with this guy’s hair?” he asked them. The girls looked me over. “He has so much,” one of them said. “Why doesn’t he cornrow it?” “Shit, yeah,” they said. “That’s great!” I said, “What? Cornrows? No!” “No, no,” they said. “Do it.” Bongani dragged me to a hair salon down the street. We went in and sat down. The woman touched my hair, shook her head, and turned to Bongani. “I can’t work with this sheep,” she said. “You have to do something about this.” “What do we need to do?” “You have to relax it.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  A couple of people looked round, there was an ‘Oooh’ from the other side of the room, spoken in a uniquely homosexual tone of bored outrage, the tentacles withdrew, and after a few moments, compatible perhaps with some fantastic notion of the preservation of dignity, the advancer retreated, earning a curse from the man at the end of the row, who was forced to get up again, attempting to conceal his erection as he did so. Exhilarated by my control of the situation, I spread myself again; the boy duly came over the other’s face, and very pretty it looked, the blobs and strings of spunk smeared over his eyelids, nose, and thick half-opened lips. Then, abruptly, it was another film. Half a dozen boys entered a locker-room, and at just the same moment the door from the stairs opened and something came in that looked, in the deep shadow, as if it might be nice. It was a sporty-looking boy with, evidently, a bag. He was not sure what to do, so I bent my telepathic powers on him. The poor creature struggled for a moment … but it was hopeless. He stumbled up towards the back, groped past the businessman (I heard him say ‘Sorry’) and sat a seat away from me, putting his bag on the seat between us. I let a little time elapse and distinctly heard him swallow, as if in lust and amazement, as the boys stripped off and, before we knew where we were, one of them was jacking off in the shower. Something made me certain that it was the first time he had been to a place like this, and I remembered how enchanting it is to see one’s first porn-film. ‘Christ! They’re really doing it,’ I recalled saying to myself, quite impressed by the way the actors seemed genuinely to be having sex for the pleasure of it, and by the blatant innocence of it all. I then proceeded by a succession of distinct and inexorable moves, shifting into the place between us and at the same time pushing his bag along the floor to where I had been sitting. I sensed some anxiety abour this, but he carried on looking at the screen. Next I slid my arm along the back of his seat, and as he remained immobile I made it as clear as I could in the dark that I had my cock out and was playing with it. Then I leant over him more, and ran my hand over his chest. His heart was racing, and I felt all the tension in his fixed posture between excitement and fear, and knew that I could take control of him.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  They’re really doing it,’ I recalled saying to myself, quite impressed by the way the actors seemed genuinely to be having sex for the pleasure of it, and by the blatant innocence of it all. I then proceeded by a succession of distinct and inexorable moves, shifting into the place between us and at the same time pushing his bag along the floor to where I had been sitting. I sensed some anxiety abour this, but he carried on looking at the screen. Next I slid my arm along the back of his seat, and as he remained immobile I made it as clear as I could in the dark that I had my cock out and was playing with it. Then I leant over him more, and ran my hand over his chest. His heart was racing, and I felt all the tension in his fixed posture between excitement and fear, and knew that I could take control of him. He had on a kind of bomber jacket, and under that a shirt. I let my hand linger at his waist, and admired his hard, ridged stomach, slipping my fingers between his shirt buttons, and running my hand up over his smooth skin. He had beautiful, muscular tits, with small, frosted nipples, quite hairless. My left hand gently rubbed the base of his thick neck; he seemed to have almost a crew-cut and the back of his head was softly bristly. I leant close to him and drooled my tongue up his jaw and into his ear. At this he could no longer remain impassive. He turned towards me with a gulp, and I felt his fingertips shyly slide on to my knee and shortly after touch my cock. ‘Oh no,’ I think he said under his breath, as he tried to get his hand around it, and then jerked it tentatively a few times. I continued stroking the back of his neck, thinking it might relax him, but he kept on feeling my dick in a very polite sort of way, so I brought pressure to bear, and pushed his head firmly down into my lap. He had to struggle around to get his stocky form into the new position, encumbered by the padded arm between our seats; but once there he took the crown of my cock into his mouth and with me moving his head puppet-like up and down, sucked it after a fashion. This was all very good and with my hangover I felt it with electric intensity. But I was aware of his reluctance, and let him stop. He was inexpert, and though he was excited, needed help. We sat back for a while, my hand all the time on his shoulder. I loved the nerve with which I’d done all this, and like most random sex it gave me the feeling I could achieve anything I wanted if I were only determined enough.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  We started our search in Mindo, a little town on the western slopes of the Andes at sixteen hundred meters in altitude, to the west of the capital of Quito. Mindo has since become a bustling ecotourism destination, but in 1985 it was a sleepy village with only a few dozen houses lining its mud streets. The forests around Mindo, however, were filled with diverse birdlife. We were thrilled to find Golden-winged Manakins foraging for fruit among flocks of brilliant Tangara tanagers. But we were unable to find any territorial males or any evidence of song or display activity. When asked by the curious locals if we had found the bird we were looking for, we had to explain, “La epoca no está buena.” It’s not the right season. Of course, we had no idea what the right season was. After a month in Mindo without success, we got a great tip from an expatriate American ornithologist and bird artist, Paul Greenfield, who would later co-author the excellent Birds of Ecuador with Robert Ridgely. Paul had recently been birding along a mini railway line that ran parallel to the Colombian border from the north Andean town of Ibarra down to San Lorenzo on the Pacific coast. In the cloud forest around the tiny settlement of El Placer, he had seen plenty of Golden-winged Manakins. Perhaps, he suggested, if we went to a new locality with different geography, altitude, and weather conditions, it would be breeding season there, and we would be able to find the displaying males we were looking for. We decamped to El Placer—literally “Pleasure”—via a train that consisted of a single car, like a city bus with small-gauge railroad wheels. This one car made a single round-trip to the coast and back each day. The “town” of El Placer was really just a collection of about ten rough-hewn, tin-roofed plank houses for the families of the workers who maintained that stretch of the railroad track. Besides the houses there was nothing in El Placer except an empty school, a railroad company office that doubled as a small store, and a few muddy footpaths into the surrounding forest. El Placer must surely rank among the rainiest places on earth. It rained or drizzled continuously throughout the six weeks we were there. Even at the quite low altitude of five hundred to six hundred meters, the forest was very cool and mossy. The forest was second-growth cloud forest that had regenerated since the construction of the railroad decades before. We found a beautiful community of birds there, including Golden-winged Manakins, on the very first morning.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  After some discussion, Doug and Camille decide to see The Amityville Horror , a movie about a haunted house that happens to be a few towns over. As they debate about whether the story is true, I ponder what brand of designer jeans I’m going to choose. Doug leaves his car at the far end of the parking lot so he and Camille can search for a newspaper that lists the theater show times. I wander into Billy Blake’s and head straight back to the juniors’ department, where I examine a rack of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. I find a bright orange pair that I love, imagining how the kids at school will admire my designer duds. I slip them under a larger pair and clip them both to the hanger. On the way to the fitting room I pick up a few shirts; and when the attendant checks the quantity of items I carried in, she hands me a plastic card with the number 4. I smile and close the fitting-room stall door. I take off my pants, step into the Gloria Vanderbilts, and pull my pants back over them. My oversize T-shirt falls past my waist, successfully hiding the double waistband. I pause to make sure the orange hem isn’t visible above my shoes. Then I wait a little longer to make it seem as though I’m deliberating, deciding what to buy of all the clothes I’d carried in. When I exit the room, I hand an armful of clothes and my plastic number 4 to the attendant. “Bummer,” I say, shrugging at her. “Nothing fit.” It’s actually no lie: The jeans are too big on me, but that doesn’t matter . . . nor does the fact that they’re the same color as a construction cone. I saunter my way toward the exit but inside I’m dying to break into a run. My very own Gloria Vanderbilt jeans! Just as I walk out the door, however, a voice bellows in my direction. I sprint out to the parking lot and, hearing the security guard behind me, do the only thing I can think of: duck behind a car. (I made it!) As I try to catch my breath in silence, I feel a growing confidence that I’ve lost him in the darkness. Just then I spot the glow of a flashlight and hear his hard-soled shoes clicking up and down the rows of cars. I slither underneath the belly of the car I ducked behind, praying the driver doesn’t show up. From several rows away, I watch the feet of the man from Billy Blake’s walk farther across the parking lot. After I’m sure he’s gone back inside the store, I crawl out and, crouching low, quickly make my way to Doug’s car across the lot. After I’m safely lying down in the backseat, I swear to myself that I’ll never set foot in Billy Blake’s department store again.