An Australian Bird Learned the Sound of a Chainsaw and Will Not Forget It
Up to 80% of a male lyrebird's song is borrowed — chainsaws, camera shutters, the calls of birds long gone from his forest.
The superb lyrebird is a chicken-sized songbird from southeastern Australia, and its idea of a love song is whatever it has heard recently. Researchers tracking males on display mounds in Victoria and New South Wales find that 70 to 80 percent of their vocalizations are imitations of other species — kookaburras, currawongs, parrots, koalas, dingoes, frogs — woven into a continuous improvisation that can last twenty minutes at a stretch.
The more famous trick is what they do with man-made sounds. Lyrebirds in Sherbrooke Forest have been recorded reproducing chainsaws, electric drills, car alarms, and the sound of a film camera advancing. A David Attenborough segment for the BBC's The Life of Birds in 1998 made one of these birds globally famous; an Australian recording of a captive lyrebird imitating an electronic shooting game and a workman's tools was added to the National Film and Sound Archive in 2013.
The trick that gets less attention is that lyrebirds learn their repertoire from each other rather than from the original source. Birds in Sherbrooke have continued to imitate the pilotbird for decades after pilotbirds disappeared from that forest entirely — the song is being passed down between males who have never heard the species they're impersonating. The sound effect outlives the speaker.
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