The Bird That Does Unbelievable Impressions of Chainsaws, Car Alarms

Charles Darwin hated the peacock — hated it — at one point writing that he was simply sickened by its ostentatious feathers. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out why a creature would essentially beg to be hunted, seemingly in wanton disregard of his new theory of evolution, which is about the survival (not the evisceration) of the fittest.

The answer, Darwin eventually realized, is the principle of sexual selection. With its glorious plumage, the peacock is essentially saying to the peahen, “I’m healthy, and also I might have a bit of an ego problem.” It’s a drive so strong that it outweighs the risk of predation and justifies the tremendous energy the peacock puts into growing the feathers, not to mention lugging them around.

But sexual selection is far from a solely visual process. Behold the superb lyrebird, whose calls are surely the most impressive in the animal kingdom. It has the uncanny ability to perfectly mimic the sounds of the Australian forests it calls home, from camera shutters to other bird species to chainsaws, kinda like that guy from Police Academy with the funny voices, only it can’t carry a gun.

Just watch the video above. It’s real. I know because David Attenborough hosts it, and David is legit. This behavior is particularly common in captivity, where lyrebirds are inundated with decidedly unnatural sounds. And check out the second video below of a lyrebird in Australia’s Adelaide Zoo. It not only pulls off the din of a drill and hammer strikes, but the tone changes as a nail is driven home, guaranteeing that zoo employees will be annoyed by construction long after the construction itself is finished.



 Physiologically, what could be driving this incredible mimicry? What makes the lyrebird so adept at impersonation? Well, according to behavioral ecologist Anastasia Dalziell of the Australian National University, we don’t really know yet. We can assume the lyrebird must have excellent hearing and memory, but what makes it so special biologically hasn’t been studied at length.

What we do know is that the lyrebird is a kind of songbird, producing sound with a vocal organ roughly equivalent to our larynx called a syrinx. (Syrinx, by the way, is Greek for “panpipe” and the name of a wood nymph who fled from the advances of Pan, who was a bit of a jackass. Beseeching assistance from water nymphs at a river’s edge, she was turned into reeds, which Pan chopped to pieces and fashioned into a flute. So … yeah.)

With lyrebirds, “it is true that their syrinx is slightly different in structure than most other songbirds,” Dalziell said in an email to WIRED. “For example, it has fewer syringeal muscles, but exactly how the structure of the syrinx allows it to produce so many sounds is not yet clear.” Strangely, notes Dalziell, having more muscles in the syrinx typically corresponds with greater vocal complexity — but the ultra-talkative lyrebirds (and parrots, as it happens) are exceptions to this rule.

In the wild, males will not only flawlessly imitate some 20 different species of birds, but multiple calls from each. They’re particularly fond of imitating Australia’s famous laughing kookaburras, and Dalziell has heard them mimicking the wing beats of small birds jetting through the forest understory. Up to 80 percent of a lyrebird’s song can consist of such mimicry, according to Dalziell, and “males imitate most often during the breeding season, particularly when females are fertile, so in this species there is strong evidence that for males mimicry is sexually selected.”



The females aren’t just looking for the best crooner, but also the best dancer and the best-dressed. So, basically, the avian opposite of me. This is where the lyrebird’s sexual dimorphism — the often dramatically different body types between females and males of a species, like in peafowl — becomes abundantly clear.

“Males have elaborate plumage, dance displays, and songs, while females are visually cryptic and a lot quieter,” said Dalziell. “Females are very independent: They defend their own territory and care for the young all by themselves (leaving males a lot of time to prance about).”

And prance about they do, in fairly remarkable fashion. During the breeding season, males clear space and build several round mounds of dirt in the forest, which they will boldly defend from other males (hey, it’s not like mounds of dirt just grow on trees). When a female takes an interest, the male will approach her with his magnificent tail slung over his head, then back up to one of the mounds.

If she follows, she’s treated to one of the more bizarre mating rituals on the planet, which you can watch below. “During these sexual displays,” said Dalziell, “male superb lyrebirds coordinate song with dance so that each different song is accompanied by a unique choreography, creating a display of a level of sophistication previously known only in humans.”




This is an extremely structured performance that Dalziell breaks into four parts, A through D. The first bit is “a laser gun-like song accompanied by a side-step, followed by a middle section of two alternating songs (B and C), followed by a ‘recapitulation’ of song A before a ‘coda’ of song D.” It’s seriously epic, like, Led Zeppelin at the Royal Albert Hall in 1970 epic.

So just as humans “waltz” to waltz music and “salsa” to salsa music, Dalziell says, “so lyrebirds step sideways with their tail spread out like a veil to song A (which sounds like a 1980s video-arcade game), but jump and flap their wings with their tail in a mohawk position while singing song C (a quiet song that sounds like ‘plinkety-plinkety-plinkety’).”

Only the fittest males, with the most impressive feathers and songs and dances, are allowed to mate and pass on their genes. This will ideally produce equally, if not more, incredible attributes in their offspring. “All females need from males is sperm,” said Dalziell, “and we know from other species of birds that this scenario can lead to intense competition among males for access to females, sometimes resulting in elaborate attempts to impress females.”

Darwin’s idea that females can drive evolution in this way wasn’t exactly popular with his critics (of which there were more than a few) in the 19th century. Not only was it preposterous for female humans to — heaven forbid — make choices, but the same went for all female creatures, even dogs and cats and stuff. But such selection is how the males and females of a given species will physically diverge over countless generations when faced with an abundance of competition.

Interestingly, though, elsewhere in nature the near lack of competition will produce the same effect, only in the sexual reverse. Take, for instance, the deep sea anglerfish, whose fearsome, gargantuan females positively dwarf males, which bite and fuse to the ladies to serve as a ready supply of sperm for the rest of their miserable lives.

Read more at Wired Science