Meet the bird that changes its tune

Drongos in the Kuruman Reserve mimic the alarm calls of different species, including meerkats. When the duped victims scatter to safety, the birds swoop down and steal their food.

Drongos in the Kuruman Reserve mimic the alarm calls of different species, including meerkats. When the duped victims scatter to safety, the birds swoop down and steal their food.

Published May 2, 2014

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Durban - The finest form of thievery is in the art of smart deception, and in this instance a little African bird has it down pat.

Even when caught in the act, the drongo is smart enough to simply change his tune.

A study by Dr Tom Flower, an author and researcher at the Percy Fitzpatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town, has revealed that the drongo, a common African resident of the feathered kind, deceives other species, including meerkats, by mimicking their alarm calls.

The aim of this racket is simply to grab a free lunch while the victims run for their lives.

Flower has spent six months since 2008 walking 5km to 15km a day, six days a week, recording drongo behaviour in the Kuruman Reserve in the Northern Cape, near the border with Botswana.

He has found that the bird is able to deceive other species, including meerkats and pied babblers, by mimicking their alarm calls. However, just as in Aesop’s fable about the boy who cried wolf, the drongo can make too many false alarms and cause his victims to wise up. But, no worries, the drongo then simply mimics a different alarm call.

The reserve is the home of a long-term study on meerkats that began in 1993 and was documented in the TV series Meerkat Manor.

About 14 meerkat groups are the subject of the studies. In temperatures ranging from -11°C on winter mornings to 42°C in the summer, Flower followed the meerkats, walking among them.

In the course of the research, he habituated and colour-ringed about 200 birds living in 40 territories which overlap those of the meerkats and the babblers.

“I’ve trained the drongos to come to a call. So if I want to find drongo ‘Dave’, for example, I can walk into his territory, give a call and he’ll come flying to me in return for a reward. He’ll rapidly get back to his natural behaviour, hawking flies or following meerkats and babblers to steal their food, allowing me to tag along and watch what happens,” he said.

“Few people realise that perhaps the world’s most important field research project studying the evolution of co-operative societies is located in South Africa,” he said.

A co-author on the drongo manuscript published in the May 2 edition of the journal Science, Dr Amanda Ridley, began studying babblers in the reserve in 2003.

 

The Mercury

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