The Greater Honeyguide, a Bird That Understands Humans | Hacker News Reader

The Greater Honeyguide, a Bird That Understands Humans

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92 pointsbreitling11 comments

Another amazing bird worth knowing about is the Lyrebird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjE0Kdfos4Y

It copies not just the songs of other birds, but man-made sounds as well! Check out the link, it's mindblowing.

Unfortunately, it may not quite be true [1]. The lyrebirds that mimic the man-made sounds are not wild ones but filmed at a zoo. So far, there hasn't been recordings of wild lyrebirds mimicking human-made sounds.

I'm a David Attenborough fan, but in the interest of accuracy, this has to be made known. That video segment was made in the older days of natural history documentary where some artistic license was taken.

[1] "Lyrebirds mimicking chainsaws: fact or lie?" [ https://theconversation.com/lyrebirds-mimicking-chainsaws-fa... ]

There are lyrebirds at the bottom of Bungonia gorge that accurately mimic the sound of people walking with racks of climbing gear. I've heard them many times. Only one point of anecdata, but I'm convinced they'll attempt to mimic any sound they're exposed to for long enough.

Edit: the article that you linked mentions that they have a range of metallic sounds in their vocab already, so I assume they've just copied the pitches and patterns distinctive to people walking with a trad rack. Still off-putting when you hear it for hours and the entire gorge can be traversed in about 20 minutes and is completely visible from a couple of pitches up a climb. You tend to assume that there's another climbing party aimlessly wandering in circles just out of sight!

I used to hear mocking birds mimicking car alarms when I lived in LA.

oh my god! I am totally blow away by this. Thank you for posting this.

I don't remember now where I read it, but crows will lead hunters to game. There was a certain signal the hunters would give to tell the crow that they were hunting, and the crow would fly over the game and dip its wing in a certain way to let the hunters know where it was without tipping it off.

A bird kills other birds in the nest, then leads humans to annihilate bee nests? This thing is pure evil.

And thus the understanding of humans.

This reminded me of Werner Herzogs talk on nature (in the jungle this time) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjjnZvtwtqA

"...there is a lot of misery, the same misery that is all around us.."

The humans are the ones annihilating bee nests. The bird is just opportunistic.

Perhaps you mean that humans are pure evil, given the other ways we treat animals and plants and other living things in this, our only home.

there was also a part about this in BBCs Human Planet series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpsdPSkfkGw

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