Multilingual Bird Raises The Alarm

Sri Lankan Drongo birds similar to the one pictured above are multilingual birds capable of imitating the alarm calls of the other bird species that they travel with.

The birds travel in mixed-species flocks that average about 12 species and nearly 40 individuals. The Drongo birds have varied repertoires: they can imitate other species' notes in the same contexts as other birds and also mimic the calls of predators, which they use in alarm situations.

The discovery was made by the Eben Goodale of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Of his initial encounter with the birds, Goodale said:

"I still remember vividly the moment that I first observed this behavior. I was following through the rainforest a mixed-species flock of birds. From the back of the flock, one bird, a greater racket-tailed drongo, swooped down and approached me to within three meters at my head height. The drongo was clearly mobbing me—a behavior that birds use to notify other individuals of the presence of a stationary predator.

"[Then] the drongo did an extraordinary thing: it began to mimic the mobbing-specific note types of other species. It kept rotating through the mobbing notes of other species, in addition to its own notes. I wouldn't have understood what was happening if I hadn't just completed a study on the alarm-associated calls of all the species in the flock system."

Goodale's finding was published in a Dec. 2005 in an online issue of the journal for the Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences.

--LiveScience Staff

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Credit: : Amila Salgado