Photo of a male cock-of-the-rock by Candy McManiman. This
picture was made at the big dancing place (lek) for
cocks-of-the-rock near the Voltzberg in the Raleighfalls nature
reserve in Suriname, just as all the other pictures. There is a short film (7 sec but still 1 MB,
mpg format), taken from a video about my friend Paul Woei, the
Surinamese artist. It shows a male cock-of-the-rock near the
Voltzberg , a place where males dance on a court in the middle of
the forest. Seeing the orange birds (with the size of a rooster)
in the all-green surroundings is spectacular. Sometimes tens of
males compete, but only a few of them get the chance of
copulating with a (dull brown-green) female. Nesting places are
nearby in an area with huge boulders. The birds make a sound a
little bit like that of a cat and they eat fruits from trees (you
can listen to a raw cry from the cock-of-the-rock
and the soft hooing of a plumbeous pigeon, recorded by Otte
Ottema). So on walking there, you often hear a cat in the trees
above you.
The pictures below: first a female, brown with a crest also from
Candy. Then obviously a single male photographed (with flash) by
Carla Out in November 2007 and then five males out of a much
larger group in the small trees near the lek (also by Candy
McManiman). Below is a photo of a bird on the same spot by Peter
Relson in 2002. Then out of a book with descriptions of animals
by Arnout Vosmaer (1766) a drawing of a bird from Suriname.
Each small square indicates the observation of at least one (group) of these birds, the medium ones at least 4 observations on different days and the largest ones 10 or more. The color of each square indicates: blue for coastal area, yellow for savanna and red for rainforest. It seems to wander from its lek in extermely dry seasons, as a male was spotted near Zanderij airport (yellow above) in the sixties with a abnormal drought, where it was seen by H. Robert. The distribution of the Guianan cock-of-the-rock in South America is sketched below (1) and an indication of the Andean cock-of-the-rock (2) is also given.
| Distribution in Suriname (explanation) | |
| Coastal area |  |
| Savanna | |
| Forests |  |
| Mountain forests |  |
| Sipalawini savanna | |
Names in:
More photos of birds from Suriname, part 5
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