Singing like a cricket

Let's hear it for the male manakin. The manakin makes the swiftest known movement of any vertebrate - the birds strike the tips of their wing feathers together behind their backs in a shivering motion at 106 times a second.

That's the fastest known limb movement in any vertebrate - faster than a rattlesnake, or a hovering cuban bee hummingbird. That's fast.

Charles Darwin wrote in 1871 about the sounds of the manakin, but it's only now that scientists have worked out how, exactly, this remarkable bird sings the way it does.