Author: Matt Simon.

Meet the Bird That Lies and Tricks Its Way Into Sex

Caption: Bowerbird Corbis

Disneyland’s a lie. Mickey Mouse, for instance, isn’t a mouse at all, but a costume with a person inside. The architecture, too, is deceptive. That giant castle isn’t as tall as it looks, because designers deployed something called forced perspective, making the windows near the top smaller so they seem farther away.

• It’s some next-level sneakiness that the great bowerbird would find laughable. It was deploying its own visual tricks long before Walt Disney came around. The male great bowerbird constructs a beautiful tubular structure out of twigs, depositing bones and snail shells to make courts at either end. He arranges these in a very specific way, though, opposite of what’s going on in Disneyland: By deploying forced perspective, the male bowerbird actually makes his court look smaller. Also very unlike Disneyland, he does it to help him get laid. Read more.