The bower consists of two parallel walls of upright sticks set on a platform, with a display court at one end where the male arranges his collection. Satin bowerbirds strongly favour blue objects: feathers, berries, and in settled areas bottle tops, straws and pegs. Males paint the inner walls with chewed vegetable matter applied with a wad of bark held in the bill.
The structure is purely a courtship arena. Females visit several bowers, assess the display, and mate with a chosen male, then leave to build a small cup nest of twigs in a tree, incubate, and provision the chicks without help. Males meanwhile continue displaying and raid rivals' bowers, stealing decorations and wrecking the construction.
What drives the preference for blue is not fully resolved. Blue is scarce in the natural forest litter, which would make a large blue collection costly to assemble, but whether females respond to blueness itself, to quantity, or to the arrangement remains a live question.