Male birds traveling through sexual association will mimic the sound of a plight of other birds to fool their mate and prevent her from escaping, new research from Australia has found.
The remarkable discovery was made after analyzing audio and video of amazing lyre birds – a species known for extravagant dance routines and the ability to mimic the calls of more than 20 other species.
According to researchers, males can simultaneously reproduce the vocal ‘bullying’ sounds, as well as the sounds of throbbing wings made by other bird species as they try to scare off a predator.
The imitation of lyre birds for males is so accurate that it not only fools the female of the lyre bird, but also with experimental version that other small birds have been deceived into thinking that there is a threat in the environment.
Lyrebirds are known to mimic other sounds in captivity, including chainsaws and car alarms.
Dr Anastasia Dalziell, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Wollongong, led the research published in the journal Current Biology.
“Male birds are capable of doing amazing things and terrible things,” she said.
Dalziell first heard lyrebirds mimic the bullying calls in 2007 and studied the capability in detail in two populations – one in Sherbrooke Forest in Victoria, the other in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. These places are 700 km apart.
Together with her colleagues, she was sure that the imitation had something to do with mating, but was not immediately clear why.
But other scientists point to a similar behavior in other animals. Male topi antelopes use a false alarm call when females move away from their “display arenas”.
The male maize orchard moth will mimic the sound of predatory bats long enough to freeze a female, giving the male time to mate.
“Lyrebirds use the same strategy, but do it in an extraordinary way, like lyrebirds look like,” Dalziell said.
From the research, it was found that male lyre birds only reproduced the sound when they lured a female to their “display area” – a small space in the forest, cleared for courtship – or when they were copulating.
Dalziell says these two moments are crucial to reproductive success, suggesting that mimicking a herd is an important sexual behavior for men.
She said they were further convinced when their footage showed lyre birds responding to the mimicking calls and returning to display areas.
When the mimicking calls were analyzed in detail, researchers were able to detect bullying calls that sounded like eastern yellow pickups, brown thorn belts, and white-brown scrub waxes. Sometimes the researchers detected alarm calls that sounded like two kinds of possum.
To compare the fake bullying choir to a real one, Dalzielle said they had to use their own deceptive behavior to get local birds to reproduce the calls.
“We threw in a rubber hose,” she said.
Dalziell said the male birds always use their deceptive trick.
Males strive to mate with females. This is just one of the many things men do.
‘They have this beautiful dance routine and they will sing from dawn to dusk, and the woman gets all these other beautiful signals. We should not see the lyre birds terribly.
‘We have a tendency to romance about the birds, but they are animals and are capable of wonderful things. But they also do things that we do not like, but also not as human beings. ‘
Lyrebirds will regularly mimic other species and Dalziell said their repertoire extends beyond 20 different species.
‘They only mimic local species. They do this mainly during the breeding season and it’s part of their dawn choir – and it’s very, very accurate. ”