Data and video from: The mating ritual of a rainforest tinamou, Tinamus major

The mating systems of many rainforest birds remain poorly understood, especially those that elude observation in dense forest understories. Here we documented mating behaviors in a pair of Great Tinamous, Tinamus major (Tinamidae), a secretive species with a wide distribution across the lowland Central and South American tropics. Despite anecdotal preconceptions that males court females, we observed predominant courtship displays from the putative female tinamou. In this mating ritual recorded in the birds’ natural habitat, only the putative female vocalized in the form of clucking and soft-rolling songs, and courted the putative male with a suite of courtship displays, such as neck-elongation, tail-raising, crouching, and feather-fluffing. In contrast, the putative male watched while standing still, approached, tail-raised, walked away, and mounted the putative female a few times. The clucking song of the putative female had not been described previously but we repeatedly observed this..., The song analysis was extracted from our field video recording (attached), or from Xeno Canto with RavenPro. A single researcher Yinger Guo conducted the song analysis., , # Data and video about Courtship behavior of a secretive forest tinamou, Tinamus major

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.79cnp5j5p](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.79cnp5j5p)

## Description of the data and file structure

#### File: Tinamou\_Mating\_Video.mp4.zip

**Description:** a video recording of Tinamou courtship interactions

The two CSV files below are respectively the recordings of the putative female during courtship interactions (Tinamus.major_Mating_SongUnits.Putative.Female.csv) versus the regular morning advertisement songs by males or both sexes (Panama_Units.csv). All the song analyses were extracted from the recordings in Gamboa, Panama. Tinamus.major_Mating_SongUnits.Putative.Female.csv is based on acoustic extractions from the mp4 video. Please see the associated article for details. 

#### File: Tinamus.major\_Mating\_SongUnits.Putative.Female.csv

**Description:** This is RavenPro analysis of spectrograms of Tinamus major songs from putative males and females. 

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