Revealed: How humans and wild birds collaborate to get honey and wax…using a ‘brrr-hm’

24 August 2016 - 14:22 By Deneesha Pillay

Experiments carried out in Mozambique show that the honeyguides direct people to where they can find bees’ nests‚ according to research released by the University of Cape Town (UCT).Through a human’s ability to subdue stinging bees with smoke‚ and having the ability to chop open their nests‚ they provide wax for the honeyguide and honey for people.In a paper called Reciprocal signalling in honeyguide-human mutualism‚ published in the journal Science‚ evolutionary biologist Dr Claire Spottiswoode from the University of Cambridge and UCT‚ and her co-authors‚ conservationists Keith Begg and Dr Colleen Begg of the Niassa Carnivore Project‚ reveal that “honeyguides are able to respond adaptively to specialised signals given by people seeking their collaboration‚ resulting in two-way communication between humans and wild birds”.The mutual relationship plays out in the wild and occurs without any conventional form of “training” or coercion.“What’s remarkable about the honeyguide-human relationship is that it involves free-living wild animals whose interactions with humans have probably evolved through natural selection‚ probably over the course of hundreds of thousands of years‚” Spottiswoode said.The birds fly from tree to tree directing the people where to go. The people then respond with a “honey-hunting call”‚ which is “a loud trill followed by a short grunt: “brrr-hm”.Spottiswoode made recordings of this call and other “control sounds”‚ such as arbitrary words called out by the hunters and the calls of another bird species.“When these sounds were played back in the wild during experimental honey-hunting trips‚ birds were much more likely respond to the ‘brrr-hm’ call made to attract them than they were to either of the other sounds‚” UCT said in a statement.“The traditional ‘brrr-hm’ call increased the probability of being guided by a honeyguide from 33% to 66%‚ and the overall probability of being shown a bees’ nest from 16% to 54% compared to the control sounds. In other words‚ the ‘brrr-hm’ call more than tripled the chances of a successful interaction‚ yielding honey for the humans and wax for the bird‚” Spottiswoode said.“Intriguingly‚ people in other parts of Africa use very different sounds for the same purpose – for example‚ our colleague Brian Wood’s work has shown that Hadza honey-hunters in Tanzania make a melodious whistling sound to recruit honeyguides.“We’d love to know whether honeyguides have learnt this language-like variation in human signals across Africa‚ allowing them to recognise good collaborators among the local people living alongside them‚” she added.The greater honeyguide is widely found in sub-Saharan Africa‚ and its interactions with humans to obtain food are mutually beneficial‚ but to obtain care for its young it is a brutal exploiter of other birds‚ UCT said.“Like a cuckoo‚ it lays its eggs in the nests of other birds‚ and its chick hatches equipped with sharp hooks at the tips of its beak. Only a few days old‚ the young honeyguide uses these built-in weapons to kill its foster siblings as soon as they hatch‚” Spottiswoode said.“So the greater honeyguide is a master of deception and exploitation as well as cooperation – a proper Jekyll and Hyde of the bird world‚” she added. ..

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