Scientists have discovered a breed of sandpiper with four different sexes. It makes for a complicated mating season

Name: Ruffs.

Age: Up to four-and-a-half years, on average.

Family: Sandpiper.

Appearance: Drab, mottled brown in the case of the female birds; brightly tufted heads, orange faces, black chests, and a large ruff of ornamental feathers in the case of most males.

Why only most males? Well, that’s the thing. Ruffs also have very elaborate gender politics.

Birds have gender politics? These ones do. Most male ruffs gather together each breeding season in great mass displays of their spectacular neck feathers and physical prowess. These gatherings are called leks, and the females enjoy looking around them, responding to the best males by bending over and presenting their genitals in a fairly unambiguous sign that they are willing to mate.

How heteronormative. I guess. Although among male ruffs there are other lifestyles. A small proportion of males don’t bother with spectacular plumage or engaging in displays, but instead wander around the lek looking for any females who, you know, happen to be bending over.

Um … And a third type of extremely rare male goes even further, thanks to an inverted section of its genome, which has just been identified by scientists in Britain and Sweden.

Oh yes? Basically it looks just like a female, albeit a rather big one, and it too wanders around the lek looking for any real females that have made themselves available for mating. “The female bows down, and sometimes it’s a case of which male gets there first,” explains Terry Burke of the University of Sheffield, who led the British team behind the discovery. “It’s not necessarily a highly aggressive act.”

Well, that’s a relief. Nevertheless the cross-dressing males, known as “faeders”, also have unusually large testes, probably to help them get the job done.

Yikes! What’s more, in all the confusion, the conventional-looking or “independent” males then often end up mounting the “faeders” while they in turn are mounting the females, in what a colleague of Burke’s calls “the sandwich”.

In the “confusion”, eh? That’s their story, and they’re sticking to it.

Do say: “No, I don’t want no ruffs. A ruff is a bird that can’t get no love from me.”

Don’t say: “Let’s talk about leks, baby.”