112 / / JANUARY 2017
Honeyed tones
However far apart we are from birds in terms of evolution,
most of us love birdsong. Bird watchers often learn to imitate
their calls, and a few societies have built a dialogue with the
birds around them. In parts of Africa, honey gatherers connect
with a bird known as the honeyguide, which helps them track
down bees’ nests. ‘People walk through the bush making
special sounds to alert honeyguides. The Yao people of
Mozambique make one particular sound in this context,’ says
evolutionary biologist Claire Spottiswoode at the University of
Cambridge, who has studied them. It’s
like a trill followed by a grunt, she says.
‘Talking’ to the birds like this doubles
the odds that a honeyguide will help
search for a bees’ nest. ‘It tells the
honeyguide you’re their friend,’ one
honey gatherer told her. This system
brings many benefits. For the hunter-
gatherer Hadza community in Tanzania,
as much as a tenth of their calories
comes from the honey they collect. In
return, the birds feed on the wax after
the humans have taken the honey.
‘The interaction between humans and
honeyguides is likely to be very ancient,
probably something in the order of
hundreds of thousands of years,’ adds
Spottiswoode. While tame animals
often interact with their owners,
honeyguides are wild, making this
relationship unique. ‘Their cooperative
behaviour has almost certainly evolved
through natural selection,’ she says.
Research such as this highlights
that birds aren’t as ‘bird-brained’ as
some people had assumed. Indeed, in
2016, European and South American
researchers studying two-dozen
species found that, while birds’ brains
may be relatively tiny, the cells within
them can be more densely packed thanthose of rodents and some primates. Parrots and songbirds
have some of the most surprising brains of all.
‘We probably underestimated how many species have some
communication system,’ says Moira Yip. ‘Nevertheless, the
gulf between human language and the systems found in birds,
cetaceans and even primates remains huge, and how that gulf
was crossed as humans evolved remains largely mysterious.’
Even so, bird researchers continue to be surprised by the
likenesses they see between humans and birds, especially
in making a tune. ‘There is no common ancestor of birds
and humans that had a music-like song,’ says Doolittle.
‘But somehow, independently through evolution, birds and
humans have ended up fairly similar, both in the way they
sound and in the role songs play in their lives.’Some birdsongs are so complex
that they can contain as many as
80 notes per second.
While most birds sing from a
perch, skylarks sing while flying to
show off to mates how fit they are.
The Australian lyrebird, below,
one of nature’s best imitators, can
copy the sounds of ringing mobile
phones and camera clicks.
Did you
know?
To find out
more about the
honeyguide birds,
visit bbc.in/2fxUqnr