Honeyguide Birds Can Recognize Distinct Vocal Signals to Help People Locate Beehives: Study

Greater honeyguides (Indicator indicator), a species of African bird, are well known to guide other species to beehives. They have even been known to work with honey badgers, but their closest and most successful collaborators are humans. Several indigenous African groups work with these birds across their range. Looking at these interactions in Tanzania and Mozambique, a due of scientists has shown that honeyguides respond more readily to the specific calls of their local honey-hunting partners than they do to the calls of honey hunters from other regions. Thus, honeyguides appear to learn the calls of their local partners, and honey hunters maintain these successful calls over generations.

Although the animal kingdom is full of interspecific mutualism, systems in which humans successfully cooperate with wild animals are rare.

One such relationship involves the greater honeyguide, a small African bird known to lead humans to wild bees’ nests.

Humans open the nests to collect honey, and the honeyguides eat the exposed beeswax.

Human honey hunters in different parts of Africa often use specialized and culturally distinct calls to signal they are looking for a honeyguide partner and to maintain cooperation while following a guiding bird.

For example, honey hunters from the Yao cultural group in northern Mozambique use a loud trill followed by a grunt (‘brrr-hm’).

In contrast, honey hunters from the Hadza cultural group of northern Tanzania use a melodic whistle.

These successful calls have been maintained in these groups for generations.

In a series of field experiments across these areas, Dr. Claire Spottiswoode from the University of Cambridge and the University of Cape Town and Dr. Brian Wood from the University of California Los Angeles and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology investigated whether honeyguides are more likely to respond to signals of their local human culture than to those of another culture or to arbitrary human sounds.

The authors discovered that honeyguides in the Yao area were more than three times more likely to initiate a guiding response to the Yao’s distinct call than the Hadza’s whistle.

Conversely, honeyguides in the Hadza area were more than three times as likely to respond to the Hadza’s whistle than the Yao’s brrr-hm.

“It’s such a privilege to witness cooperation between people and honeyguides — these are birds who specifically come to seek us out,” Dr. Spottiswoode said.

“The calls really sound like a conversation between the bird and the honey-hunters, as they move together towards a bees’ nest.”

According to the authors, the geographic variation and coordination between signal and response observed in this behavioral system suggests cultural coevolution between honeyguides and humans has occurred.

“What’s remarkable about the honeyguide-human relationship is that it involves free-living wild animals whose interactions with humans have evolved through natural selection, possibly over the course of hundreds of thousands of years,” Dr. Spottiswoode said.

“This ancient, evolved behavior has then been refined to local cultural traditions — the different human call sounds — through learning.”

“Our study demonstrates the bird’s ability to learn distinct vocal signals that are traditionally used by different honey-hunting communities, expanding possibilities for mutually beneficial cooperation with people,” Dr. Wood said.

The research is described in a paper in the journal Science.

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Claire N. Spottiswoode & Brian M. Wood. 2023. Culturally determined interspecies communication between humans and honeyguides. Science 382 (6675): 1155-1158; doi: 10.1126/science.adh4129