Okay, but is the lyrebird a liar?

0:00 Coming up on this episode of OK But Birds. Most people know lyrebirds from this really viral social media clip or documentary where there was a bird that was mimicking the noises of chainsaws and car alarms and even the camera shutters. It shows really just how accurate the lyrebirds are in their mimicry.

0:17 And the bit that's missing from the story is that the lyrebirds that were filmed for that clip, there's a couple of different ones, were actually... You hear this. You scan the sky. You scan the tree line. You keep scanning and eventually you find it. A blue jay? You're certain you just heard a killdeer, except you're nowhere near a place that has killdeer, and none of it makes sense until you spot the European starling doing an almost perfect killdeer.

1:14 Almost, not quite. Mimicry is everywhere once you start listening for it, and it will humble you. But today we're going to talk about what I think of as the Beyonce of mimics. This is the bird that probably comes to mind when you think about mimicry at all, and it's because of one video, David Attenborough on Australian Forest and a bird producing the sound of a camera shutter.

1:33 Okay. then a car alarm, then a chainsaw. If you've seen it, you remember it, and you maybe even thought that some of it was faked. Lyrebirds. There are two species, the superb lyrebird, which lives across the wet forests of southeastern Australia, and now Tasmania, and is the one from the video. The one from the video.

1:51 And the Albert's lyrebird, which has a much smaller range in a narrow band of upland subtropical rainforest and gets almost none of the attention. They are among the largest passerines on Earth. Passerines being the perching birds, the group that holds the sparrows and the finches and the warblers, most of which you could hold in one hand.

2:08 A lyrebird is built more like a pheasant, long legs, long tails, spends its life walking around on the forest floor, turning over leaf litter. They fly badly, they live a very long time, and they are exceptional mimics. We're talking about a bird that can mimic an entire ecological scene. More on that in a bit.

2:26 Which brings us to the topic of today's episode. Okay, but is the liar bird a liar? To help us unpack that, I'm joined by Dr. Anastasia Diehl, who studies avian ecology and evolution at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University. After the break, Anna tells us what that famous clip actually captured and what it quietly left out.

2:43 We get into what a female lyrebird does when you get too close to her nest, and she walks us through the one moment in a male's life when he abandons the beautiful stuff entirely and reaches for something else. Stay tuned. Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. I'm really excited to have Anna here today to talk all about lyrebirds.

3:04 Thanks for joining us, Anna. Thanks for having me, Scott. Of course, it's nice to reconnect after our time at Cornell together. And I just thought we could start off with the name of these birds, because I, for a long time, had assumed that they're called lyrebirds because they're mimics, and so they're lyres.

3:20 But that is not correct, right? It makes perfect sense. But in fact, that's not the case. They are called lyrebirds after the ancient instrument, ancient Greek instrument, the lyre. Because initially, when the first specimens, stuffed specimens of lyrebirds were taken by the early naturalists, from Australia to Europe, they stuffed them incorrectly once they got to Europe and stuck their tails right up behind them like a peacock displaced.

3:46 And in that position, their tails do look a little bit like the ancient Greek lyre, which is something you kind of strung and hold. You've probably seen them in the Odyssey lately. But that's completely wrong. And in fact, when lie birds do stick up their tails, the males, they flip them over their head entirely so it looks like a veil.

4:07 So even their name, I guess, is a lie. What an interesting place to start. Even their name is a lie. And I think most people know liar birds from this really viral social media clip or documentary where there was a bird that was mimicking the noises of chainsaws and car alarms and even the camera shutters.

4:24 And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what that video gets right and what it misses. Oh, it's a wonderful film. It shows really just how accurate the lie birds are in their mimicry and their breadth and what they can do. And it's so skillful. But the bit that's missing from the story is that the lie birds that were filmed for that clip, there's a couple of different ones, were actually captive birds.

4:49 And they were captive-raised individual males. So they never had the chance to learn their song and their mimicry from another male. So... What they did have was all the sounds of the zoos or the wildlife parks in which they were housed, which they did mimic. And occasionally they sometimes mimic these wild desert birds that a live bird would never, ever meet in the wild.

5:13 So it's a really good way of showing exactly how accurate they are, but it's not what they do in the wild. Yeah, yeah. Which brings me to, like, I want to talk a bit about their mimicry, because when you watch that video, you think, okay, these individuals are mimicking, you know, the sounds of chainsaws and the sound of a shutter.

5:35 But it's like you're saying, these are captive birds that didn't have the opportunity to hear other singing males and natural bird sounds. So, yeah. In like natural settings, are they mostly mimicking other birds as well as singing kind of their own song? And with all of that, what is a male lyrebird trying to accomplish?

5:53 Sure. So if we start just with the male lion birds, in the wild, they sing, they mimic most when they're breeding, which happens in the middle of the austral winter, which is very strange. It happens in the middle of the austral winter? Yeah, yeah. These are, lion birds are actually strange for lots of different reasons.

6:13 They're extremely big. They're really poor flyers and they live a really long time. And part of that, slow life history of living a long time is that the females will lay their eggs in the middle of the Australian winter, which, you know, it does actually snow in some parts of live birds range. It does get quite hot.

6:33 Yeah, yeah. And then the egg is in the nest for a very long time and she doesn't actually have to feed the young until the months later. Oh, okay. She works quite hard. But so the males, of course, are singing to attract a female. And so they need to sing when the female is fertile. And that just takes place in the middle of winter, which is very strange.

6:55 Yeah, that's so interesting. So if you do want to hear live birds in the wild, the males, the best thing is to go out in the middle of Australian winter when it's quite cold and hopefully quite wet because live birds like... A nice wet forest. And then they sing. And then they actually start off when they start mimicking, they're almost like a normal songbird.

7:18 They have a dawn chorus, they're starting when they're roost at the top of trees. So you actually walk into the forest when hardly anything's singing because nobody in their right mind is breeding at that time of year. Yeah, exactly. And then the forest is just full of this mimicry coming from the top of the trees and it's really, really loud, these birds.

7:36 And so what they're doing with this song is they're actually mimicking mostly birds. Other birds that are in the forest, but may not be very vocally active at this time of year. Right, which is an interesting piece. Like they're mimicking birds they hear a different time of year during their breeding season.

7:52 That's very cool. Some of them, yeah. So something like the beautiful liquid melodic song of the grey strikethrush. Or the golden whistler. are named for their songs, partially. But they also mimic things like kookburrows, which do actually vocalise, laugh, if you like, all year round. Eastern yellow robins are the same.

8:20 And then quite a lot of parrots as well. So some of the parrots in the Lybird's forest, they actually have quite beautiful song-like vocalisations as well. Cool. And so they're mimicking, it's mainly birds, but it's not everything. Not cuckoos, which is odd. And so that's the males are singing, but females sing as well.

8:39 Is that correct? They do. If you want to hear a female live bird mimic, your best bet is actually to really annoy her and find her nest and approach it. And then she will defend her nest by approaching you. They have a visual display that's quite similar to other species. It kind of makes them look bigger.

8:57 They raise their crest and their wings come up and they're already big. Yeah. And then they mimic things and they mimic often very scary sounds like very large eagles when a few birds are actually bigger than a lyrebird in the forest. Oh, cool. And goshawks, which can actually eat adult lyrebirds as well as they're young.

9:17 And then small birds that are indicating that a predator is around. Yeah, yeah. But the females, they mix it up. We've got recordings. When I say we, it's not me. Vicky Austin has recordings of lyrebirds mimicking introduced predators like cats. for example. Really? Meowing, it's really kind of odd. Yeah, so weird.

9:37 We're a little bit suspicious, but we think we've recorded a couple of times a lyrebird, a female, mimicking the sound of two branches of a tree squeaking together in high winds. And that is actually a very scary sound because we're working in a very tall forest full of hardwood trees. Yeah. And when it's windy, those trees or just their branches fall down and can really injure people or kill them.

10:01 So a squeaky tree is actually a very scary sound. It's so cool that the females are focused in on these scary sounds. They're defending their nest in these contexts. And the fact that they're using this interesting repertoire of scary sounds, that's so cool to me. Man. And you said they're big a couple of times, but how big are they?

10:21 Like how much do they weigh? Yes, so the heaviest male that we've measured was 1.2 kilograms. Okay. And the females tend to be around 700, 800, maybe even 900 grams. These are the superb libirds, which is the bigger of the two species. I read this paper relatively recently. I don't remember what year it came out, but I read it with my ornithology class.

10:44 And it was this paper where you found that males stopped doing these broader kind of melodic song mimicry bouts and start actually mimicking like the sound of a mobbing flock or an angry flock of birds in the forest. Can you talk us through the context within which these male lyrebirds switched to basically mimicking a mobbing flock?

11:08 Because it's so fascinating. Certainly. So while most of the time the males, during the breeding season, the males are mimicking this sort of song-like string of a different species of bird, at key moments in their life, a really crucial moment, they actually switch to an imitation of an ecological scene of a mobbing flock, a flock of birds producing mobbing alarm calls.

11:33 You can even hear the lyrebird mimicking the sound of wing beats. Really? Small birds, yeah. Oh, my God. Vocally mimicking as these birds dart over a predator. Mobbing fox among birds, they're really cool. So they often are instigated when a particular individual, like a prey species of bird, finds a hidden predator, often a snake in the environments that I'm working in.

11:58 So a snake in the long grass or in the long undergrowth, the fern bracket. And then they see this predator and rather than sort of... going away in fright and horror, they actually perch quite close, often quite close to the ground, if there's snakes on the ground, and then they produce a very audible and very loud mobbing, what they call a mobbing alarm call.

12:19 And this serves to attract other species of bird often and other individuals of the same species. And you can end up with this very conspicuous group of several different species, of prey species, of other predatory birds as well, all producing alarm calls. Sometimes they will attack the predator. They'll actually fly at it.

12:41 It's very conspicuous. So it's a complex but extremely... extremely reliable cue of the presence of a hidden predator. Yeah. And so you think it's totally impossible to fake, but this in fact is what the Libert is doing. That's so cool. Yeah, so I first came across it, it was my first year of doing fieldwork, and I was very happy because I've just seen and sound recorded a male live bird doing his full sexual display.

13:09 This is a sort of song and dance routine using live bird specific calls, so not mimicry or songs, and it's beautiful and elaborate. And then at the very conclusion, he suddenly switched to what I immediately recognized was an imitation of a mixed species mobbing flock. I quite like mobbing flocks when I hear them in the wild, I think, oh, how exciting.

13:30 And I go and see what kind of predator have they found, who's going to turn up? Are they all going to produce mobbing calls? Or is it, maybe they're going to bring in some very scary predator of the predator. It's just so exciting. It's just one of those ecological events. It's a bit like being at a theater.

13:44 It's so dramatic. I was lucky enough to sound record and see a full, successful courtship and mating again in my first year. And I was absolutely astonished to see that at the moment that the copulation happened, which takes place on the live bird's display, what they call a mound, it's sort of a circular patch on the forest floor that he has cleared and that's where he dances.

14:16 And then if the female likes him and stays, he then... They mate on the mound itself. It's on the forest floor. And the moment he got on top of her, he switched his song to this mixed species mobbing flock. It was absolutely bizarre. And also the other bizarre thing is that the population itself went on for ages for a sub bird.

14:38 It was 45 seconds with hardly any variation. Really? When we measure that from videos later on. Yeah. That's so long. I mean, we call it the cloacal kiss because it's just like, you know, one and done and they're out of there. 45 seconds is crazy. It is crazy. And there's quite a long time to mimic if you've got that time.

14:59 We think actually the cloacal kiss part of it may only happen at the end. We can't always see that. So, yeah. So he's mimicking throughout and he's mimicking a mixed species mobbing flock. Is it so she doesn't run away? Like, is that the reason to extend the time, make her afraid of leaving this display area?

15:18 Is that kind of the conclusion you've come to? Yeah, yeah. We think you're right there. So a female has come to the mound and he's performed his beautiful elaborate song and dance display with his feathers displayed and his live-earth specific amazing songs. And then she goes, no, don't like you. And she steps off the mound.

15:38 Okay. Into the long undergrowth which surrounds the mount. And it's at that moment that she steps off that he switches to this mixed species mobbing flock. Ah. And this was really suggestive. Because the mounds, for reasons that are not entirely clear, are built in long undergrowth, parts of the forest.

16:00 It's a long undergrowth, so it's almost like a theatre in the round, like a small theatre in the round. It's really the female's force to be very close to him in this courtship. And it's clear on the forest floor, which is good for dancing, among other things. But if she steps off the mound, she's stepping into long grass or long reeds or often long, very high bracken.

16:22 It's often very high on me. It's not up to my shoulders or something when I'm standing there. So she can't see her feet either. And there could be a snake there. She doesn't know. She can't see very well. So he's just at this moment, she's trying to leave. He's saying, there's something really scary out there.

16:39 I've got this. I'm not just giving you an alarm call. I'm not just mimicking one species alarm call. I'm mimicking an entire mobbing flock. Do you really want to go out there? Why don't you stay here with me? And let's try this courtship thing all over again. Yeah, give me another chance. What an interesting way of trying to get a female to stick around and this manipulation that he's doing to say, like, yeah, come back to my display area.

17:06 That's just so fascinating to me. They're already such interesting birds. I mean, we haven't even talked about their dancing, but they have this mimicry. They have their own song. And then to use vocalizations, you already said, the females use vocalizations, mimicry, to scare things away from their nests.

17:22 And then now... Males also use it to try to keep them around long enough to mate. Like it's just, I don't know, that's kind of mind-blowing to me. It's totally mind-blowing. I find these field-based recordings of live bird behavior very satisfying because they They provide an evolutionary explanation for why it has to be so complex, this mimicry.

17:43 Yeah, yeah. And so convincing. He's actually creating the acoustic illusion of two individuals calling at the same time. And you could swear that there were two species at different distances from the camera. He's creating the illusion of... There's the wing flutters of very small birds, much smaller than the live birds, so it's six grams or something, or eight, ten grams.

18:06 You can really... We don't identify them by species, but we do, you can really hear the size. And it's also put together. And then on top of that, during the mating, our video suggests that the males are actually covering the eyes of the female. So she cannot see whether there is a real mopping flock or not.

18:26 And is he covering her eyes with his tail feathers? With his wings. Wings. Oh, man. Yeah. So I would have thought it was hard enough to make them that big and for that long. And so you'd want to sort of flap to keep your balance. But in fact, his wings are right in front of her head. And you often on the camera, you can't see her head at all.

18:48 And it's very... risky for her to then develop a tolerance to that kind of signal because most of the time it will be true. There will be a snake that could be damaging to her or to her dependent young. Right, yeah. It looks like that's why she's... in one of the explanations for the complexity and sophistication and the accuracy of the male live-based mimicry.

19:14 Yeah, which is just, I mean, thinking about that evolutionary arms race and because in this species, the males provide no parental care, correct? That's absolutely correct, yeah. The females come in. It's kind of like with hummingbirds, the females... visit, mate, leave. They're the ones that leave the eggs and take care of the chicks.

19:30 And so the refinement of his mimicry over evolutionary time to do this mixed species flock all the way down to wingbeats is insane. You've spent a lot of your career arguing about what actually counts as mimicry and what doesn't. What do you want people to know about what you consider to be mimicry versus not and why?

19:49 Mimicry is in the mind of the receiver. If the receiver sees a changes its behavior in a way that benefits the original mimic, then that should be called mimicry. How stereotyped is the dance? Because you've studied the whole complex display. It's not just vocalizations, which we mostly know firebirds for, but the males also have this dance, their feathers are moving.

20:11 Is it quite stereotyped in terms of like every male does the same kind of dance or is it variable? Tell us a bit about that. Yeah, so the dance is really cool. I didn't intend to study dance in birds, but it became clear that I wasn't going to understand the song unless I understood the dance as well.

20:28 So we studied both because they're totally integrated, the song and the dance in these sexual displays. So it is highly stereotyped within a location. So it starts, the males will start this song with this really strange sound. And it looks beautiful on spectrograms, so very odd. But it sounds like a video arcade game from the 1980s.

20:53 It's really laser gun-like. Yeah. It has a pulse as well, it's very distinctive. And for this song, he has his tail over his head, but it's spread out, so it really looks like a 180 degrees veil. It's quite elaborate. And then after that, he switches to this alternating between I think we call it the B-C song.

21:22 It's very boring names. And the B song is extremely loud. It's sort of two, in this population, was two pulses. We haven't measured it, but there are pulses. You can hear it over a kilometre away. Wow. In the forest. Really loud, quite low. And then that B song alternates with a very quiet sound. Yeah.

21:43 Sometimes it just goes plinkity-plinkity. It's very annoying on a spectrogram because it's quite clicky and it doesn't always resolve, especially when you just maxed out your recorder because the B song is so loud. So technically it's a bit tricky to describe. But we discovered that when he's doing the plinkity-plinkity, he's jumping.

22:06 Yeah. Oh, cool. Almost in time, or apparently in time with himself, with his wing flaps as well. That's not easy for a library to jump because they're so big. Yeah, yeah. It's quite a thing. Yeah, so it's a highly structured event. It's more structured when there's actually a female there and they're trying to get a mating.

22:27 These songs and their dances together, they vary geographically. Yeah, which is so cool. They were moved to Tasmania, like on purpose, but were they ever native in Tasmania? As far as we know, no. Oh, okay. Interesting. There are no reports since European colonization of flybirds in Tasmania. There's no indigenous knowledge suggesting they were there.

22:51 Australia is really bad for fossils, and birds are not great for fossils either. Kind of two difficult things. Yeah. So I don't know, but at one stage they got terribly worried about live birds on the mainland. Ah, okay. Because they introduced foxes mainly. Okay. Foxes definitely eat live birds when they get the chance.

23:09 Mm-hmm. So they translocated some. They caught 22. individuals. They waited until the plane arrived in the part of Australia. And I just realised it was in the middle of the Second World War, so I don't know why they had a fair plane to translocate lyrebirds across to Tasmania, because it's quite a rough passage.

23:32 Yeah. From mainland to mainland straight to Tasmania, but they did. And then they got to Tasmania and some of them had to go on top of donkeys and a few of the not very good motor cars. But they made it. 20 individual live birds survived. And live birds are now introduced to Tasmania and they're very happy.

23:53 And I've never seen live birds look that happy, I have to say. Really? So they're just, they're doing really well there. Do they have a population estimate now? Like how many are actually in Tasmania? Like hundreds, thousands? Thousands, definitely. Wow. Yeah. I'm not quite sure what the latest number is, but it's probably higher than people think.

24:10 It's a little bit hard. There are only two extant lyrebird species and it's alberts. Is that right? Yes. Alberts and Superb. And so Alberts doesn't get as much attention. How does it differ from the Superb? We can give the Alberts Lyrebird a little bit of a spotlight here. Great. So the Alberts Lyrebird is a little bit smaller than the Superb Lyrebird, but it's more colorful.

24:33 It has a really rich, tawny color that often associated actually with rainforests. It's really, really... more elegant in this colouring. It's also a great mimic and work done by Fiona Backhouse has shown that they're more structured in the way they mimic. Oh, cool. So they really have a particular sequence in their mimic sounds.

24:56 So after you work out the sequence, you can predict what sound they're going to mimic next. Oh, cool. And it's still not randomly put together. They actually contrast the complexity of the sounds they mimic so that if you have a kind of a pure tone sound from, say, a Grey Stripe Thrush song that will be followed by a very complex, buzzy type sound, say, a flock of Rosello's having an argument or the displaced sound of a Saturn Balbert.

25:26 It's all kind of buzzy and exciting. Yeah. And these sequences that they compose of mimic sounds are shared. Oh, cool. And we think Superb's do something the same, but we haven't looked at it properly. But it's the whole order. It won't be as strict as what the Alberts do. So you have these mimetic songs that are actually cultural constructs and they vary geographically from place to place.

25:53 So the other really cool thing about the Albert Slybird is that when they do their song and dance display equivalent to the Superbs, so they have their own song, which is called the Gronking Song. Rather than having these dance movements, they actually have a favourite vine in the display site. And they hold on to the vine with their foot and they shake it in time to their song.

26:21 Really? It gets even more exciting because this vine is not just any old vine. This is usually a vine... It sometimes goes by the local name of a wait a while vine or a lawyer vine because it's a vine covered in hooks. And once those hooks get into you, you can't go anywhere and they never let go. Oh, you've got to wait a while, I see.

26:44 You've got to wait a while or the lawyer's got you. And these vines travel through the vine thickets parts of the subtropical rainforest and, yeah, And they climb over all sorts of things. So if you shake just a little bit of the right vine, you end up shaking this huge area of the environment. So this lyrebird is sitting in the middle of this vine.

27:12 So you can't see. the bird from outside the vine thicket. But once he starts shaking it, you can see this whole part of the forest is shaking in time to his tongue. And it's unbelievable. And they do that throughout their range. When there isn't loya or vine available, they sometimes even use introduced viney species and sometimes even rushes.

27:37 But there's always something that they're holding onto and that they're shaking in time with their vine. song the fact that they're doing it in time with their song is so cool it's like very percussive feeling and now i gotta get over there and see these see these birds they're fascinating i would love to see them in the world just coming winter yeah exactly well that's the time when we wouldn't usually plan to go but i suppose we do have the summer off here so then we can we can come down it is perfect yeah We've reached the part of the show we call That's BS or That's Bird Stuff, where we give our guests an opportunity to debunk a myth that ruffles their feathers.

28:12 So Anna, what do you want to call BS on? That live birds only mimic. It's not true. Live birds have their own beautiful songs, both the males and the females. And in fact, it's so beautiful that if you just heard it and you didn't know that they would mimic, you'd write home about it. You'd write songs about it.

28:31 It's just incredible. It ends with like a trail, sort of a do-do-do-do-do-do-do that goes off. And I actually think that they're hearing the echo of their own song in the cliffs and the granite, exposed granite and sandstone of some of the locations in which they live. And they've incorporated the echo back into their song.

28:58 That's awesome. Look, and there's other parts of the range where the song is so different, you swear it was another species. And it's just... like a complicated piece of solo flute music. In fact, those lybirds are sometimes called the flute lybirds because their own song is so complex and melodic and beautiful.

29:19 That's amazing. So it's worth listening to the lybirds' own songs as well as their mimicry. Yeah, we're impressed by the mimicry, but I love that they have their own beautiful songs. I appreciate that myth being busted. Well, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast to talk all about lyrebirds, Anna.

29:33 I think every time I learn about lyrebirds, I learn something new and they're even more interesting. We think about them just, I think, often as mimics, but they're dancers and they have their own beautiful song and all these really amazing natural history things. So thanks for taking the time to join us and tell us about them.

29:48 Thanks so much, Scott. It's been really fun. And I love to talk about liar birds. Well, me too. Birds are dinosaurs and around here we like our snacks. So in each episode of the Dinosaur Nugget, today's nugget is the liar bird is not a liar. The name is a mistake made in Europe by people who stuffed the bird wrong.

30:10 But the better answer is that the whole question is aimed at the wrong thing. Mimicry isn't a party trick this bird performs. It's a tool. A female facing down a threat at her nest reaches for the scariest sounds in the forest. A male about to lose a mate reaches for a crowd that isn't there. Underneath all of it, they have their own song, which almost nobody talks about and which is beautiful enough to stand on its own.

30:30 So the honest version is, you're not listening to a bird that lies. You're listening to a bird that knows exactly what a sound will do to whoever hears it. That's a wrap on this week's episode. Okay, but is the liar bird a liar? Go back and watch the Attenborough clip. You've probably seen it, but watch it knowing what you know now, and it turns into a completely different video.

30:47 Then go outside and pay attention to the mimics you actually have, like the blue jay pretending to be a red-tailed hawk. If you like this one, help us out. Leave a rating or a review and follow the show wherever you're listening. We'll catch you next time. Byeee. Okay, But... Birds is hosted by Scott Taylor with production and creative by Zach Karl.