In the vast area south of the Sahara Desert in Africa, there lives a small bird with its humble appearance and gray body, which has a very strange habit of indicating the source of honey for people and animals, so it is called "honey bird".
The honey conduct of honey birds is very unique in the animal kingdom. This act of "helping others" has aroused great interest among ornithologists.
Not unpaid labor
The honeydew is mainly found in the dense forests of the Congo Basin and parts of West Africa, but is also widely distributed from Cape Verde to North-East Africa, and then through Sudan to the vast area of Senegal. The honey bird is monotonous in color, gray-brown, about the same size as the North American blue robin, but thicker than the blue robin, with short, thick plumage and thick skin, which may be more effective in blocking the needle attack of bees. When the honey bird reaches adulthood, both male and female birds grow yellow epaulettes, and a large black spot grows on the throat of the male bird, which can distinguish between male and female by virtue of this mark. Juvenile bird feathers are slightly greener, and probably because of this, for a long time people mistakenly believed that they were two different species.
Why are honeysuckle birds willing to show the hive to humans? In fact, their "helping others" behavior is not gratuitous - while instructing the hive for people or animals, through the help of humans or animals, honey birds can get bee larvae. But how does this little bird know which people or animals can help them get the food they like to eat? For a long time, this was an unknown secret. In addition, it is not clear whether beeswax is also a favorite food for honey birds.
Both male and female honey birds have honey conduct. In addition to the honey-guiding habits of female birds, there is also a strange bad problem, that is, laying eggs in the nests of other birds to avoid the responsibility of motherhood. This habit of the honeydew is very similar to that of the North American swallow starlings, but they are not close relatives to the North American swallow starlings, but are closely related to the woodpecker. Like woodpeckers, honeydews have two claws facing forward and two backwards, but they rarely climb up trunks like woodpeckers, but instead perch on branches.
In the distribution area of the honey bird, the honey bird is generally respected by the local population, and the reason for this is not difficult to understand. The Azands, who live in northeastern Congo, even worship the honey bird as a deity, and before the arrival of the Europeans, the hunters of the honey bird were cut off by the tribal chief.
Ornithologist Herbert Lang was repeatedly "harassed" by honeybirds during his trip to the Congo. This little bird often stands on the side of the road after finding the hive, and when a passerby passes by, it will fly to a small tree only a few meters away from the person, and then there will be a chirping cry. If you want to find the source of honey, it's best to follow them and whistle at them occasionally. In his diary, Herbert Lang described in detail his encounter with the Honeydew Bird:
One afternoon, at a small, wooded pond near Faragi, we came across a male honey bird. When it saw us coming, it immediately shouted at us, then flew to the front, and then folded back and flew a little... It seems to be testing whether we are willing to go with it. We whistled at it in a low voice, as a response. So we followed it through a patch of tall grass and shrubs to a high plateau. Our feathered friend flew all the way ahead about 50 meters away, then landed on the top of a bush and disappeared from our sight. We followed the direction it flew. As soon as we showed up, it chirped again. After a while, another male bird joined in, with him leading the way ahead. We walked a long way, and finally two birds landed on a small tree. The little tree was so small and the trunk was so thin that it was impossible for a bee to nest on it. We are a little puzzled. At this moment, I saw two birds flying down the tree like headless flies and back again, as if to tell us: "This is this place." At this time, we suddenly heard a "buzzing" sound from bees, followed the sound, and found a small hole in the ground next to the small tree. The two birds flew around only three or five meters away from us.
We were about to light the fire when our bird friend suddenly fell silent. After a while I saw them again, and now they were standing on a small branch, and suddenly their chests bulged, opened their beaks, and made a low cry that I had never heard before. The two birds seemed to be arguing. After a while, I saw one in the back desperately chasing the other.
After burning the grass around me, with the help of two black assistants, I quickly dug out the bee fruit, in the price of being stung by the bee 6 times. As a result, there is no honey in the hive, only pollen and bee larvae. This cave used to be a termite nest. We placed some hive fragments on the branches and hid to the side to protect them from swarms. An hour or two later, we found two birds back, flying into the trees and starting to peck at the hive. The next morning, I found them creeping in again. One, and then another, took a piece of the hive and flew away...
Without these two birds showing us the way, we would never have found a hive hidden underground. The little reward we give them is a reward for their labor.
In Herbert's notes, it is also mentioned that local blacks often hang artificial hives on trees to attract bees, and even some people use hives made of reeds to attract bees, while the honey birds can't tell the difference between real and false, and still attract people as always, hoping to use people's hands to share a piece of the pie.
Guide honey birds and honey badgers
It has been claimed that honeydews sometimes lead people to snakes or leopards, but this has been flatly rejected by experienced naturalists. The truth is. Honeydew birds sometimes work with honey badgers. Professor Stevenson Hamilton has described this collaboration phenomenon in detail, as if he had seen it with his own eyes:
On a cool afternoon, perhaps a cloudy day, you are resting in the bushes when your thoughts may be interrupted by the chirping of a approaching bird. In a few moments, you will see a bird landing on a small branch about 30 meters away from you, and it constantly flaps its wings, showing a restless appearance. After a while, it was quiet again. At this time, a very strange sound wave constantly hits your eardrum: a slight "hissing" and "clucking" sound... At first you can't identify what animal it is, but the honey bird knows who makes the sound. After hearing the sound, the honey bird began to fly in waves, looking for another small tree 30 meters away, and began to dance its "invitation dance" again. As long as you keep quiet and look closely, you will see a gray-black animal running all the way wobbly forward. Its tail is slightly higher than its back, and its head hangs low except occasionally when it is raised to glance ahead. This gray-black animal is called the honey badger.
Birds chirp this monotonous chirp every time, which translates to bird language: "Go forward, go forward, go faster!" Honey badgers followed. Soon, a pair of collaborators flying in the sky and running underground burrowed into a hollow tree. At this time, the bees who are working hard inside can be described as "bad luck", in order to get this good meal, the honey badger uses its powerful claws to tear open the hive, and finally, the hive becomes the belly meal of the "beast".
Honey conduct
The bizarre honey conduct of honey birds is very rare in birds and is much more complex than that of starlings who give vigilance missions to buffalo and rhinos.
Starlings feed mainly on flat lice that live in animal fur, and they usually perch on the back of cattle, and when they encounter predators, they call their owners by shouting. The behavior of the honey bird reminds us of certain behaviors of dogs— dogs can often lead strangers to where their owners lie when they are in a critical condition—although the motives are completely different. The bird's behavior also reminds us of the story of a goose that was widely reported in the news media a few years ago: the goose lived on a farm in Alabama and guided a blind cow to a drinking pool every day. As it led the way, it swayed its fat body and rattled all the way to the front, followed by the blind cow. Although the authenticity of the story has been questioned by some zoologists, the news was published by the reputable New York Times.
How to explain the honey conduct of honey birds? Animal behavior experts believe that female and male adult birds, and perhaps immature sub-adult birds, have this honey conduction behavior, and their honey guide instinct is continued from generation to generation through inheritance.
At least the honey conduct of ordinary honey birds is obtained in this way. So, how did the honey conduct of honey birds originate? Most people believe that honey conduct evolved with the evolution of animals in this family, of course, they did not evolve this instinct to benefit humans, and in fact humans are not the only beneficiaries. Before Europeans entered Africa, honey birds fed on bees, which may be why honey birds evolved honey conduct.
It is not a large family , it has 5 genera and 12 species , two of which live in Asia and the rest in sub-Saharan Africa. Honeydews are smaller, and none of them have a body length of more than 20 cm. Herbert has conducted in-depth research on 4 genera of honeydew birds and donated 6 specimens of his preservation to the American Museum. As far as he knew, the honey bird could not guide honey to humans except for one species called the "ordinary honey bird". However, Herbert consulted a large number of sources and found that species called "scaly-throated honey birds" living in eastern and southern Africa can also indicate the source of honey. Professor John Cork described the bird in detail in 1864:
We found a feathered bird in the nest of the yellow-throated stone finch, and before that, we had seen a scaly-throated honey bird landing on the tree, which inferred that this bird was also of this species. The tip of the bird's upper and lower beaks is curved, similar to the calcium head that grows at the top of the upper beak of a young woodpecker. Professor Doctor Hagna later collected a live, ordinary honeydew chick that had almost fully feathered but still retained two curved hooks in its upper and lower beaks. A few days later, the hook at the top of the lower beak fell off. After a few more days, the bend at the top of the beak also fell. The rough heel pads on the paws of honeydews resemble the paw pads of tropical toucans and toucan chicks, suggesting that they are closely related.
In fact, most honey birds do not conduct honey, at least not for humans. Scientists examined the stomach contents of honeydew birds in the Congo and found that most species do not often swallow beeswax, only ordinary honeybirds have this kind of thing in their stomachs. Honeydews also occasionally eat termites and adult bees, but they seem to prefer to eat bee larvae and hives. The stomach of the honey bird smells like honey, and scientists speculate that the beeswax is only swallowed by incidental, not that they like to eat this kind of thing.
Other collaborators
How many collaborators does Honey Bird have? The only bees living in Africa are ordinary bees and smaller spineless bees. We know that bees always like to store sweets in a safe place, such as tree holes, crevices, or underground caves, and that birds can hardly steal from these places without the help of collaborators. Stingless beehives are usually built in hollow trees, and honeydews are difficult to get into. The cousin of the honey bird, the woodpecker, has a chisel-like sharp beak and can easily chisel the tree body, but the honey bird lacks this attack weapon, and their beaks are mostly rounded and blunt.
All honey birds feed on hives, and they simply can't get this food without help. Honeydew birds living in South Africa rely on honey badgers to help them, so do they have any other animal collaborators besides honey badgers? Honey badgers are difficult to find in the forests near the equator in West Africa, and scientists speculate that local squirrels, small carnivores, lemurs and monkeys may all be mutually beneficial symbiosis targets. This hypothesis may seem too bold, but it is the best explanation for the way honey birds get their food. There is also the idea that honeydew birds may have stumbled upon their remnants after other animals had plundered their hives, but this view has been questioned by most scientists.
The honey bird and its collaborators begin their partnership in such a way: first, the honey bird finds and invites mammals that like to prey on bees, it is the "seeker"; once the invitee is on the road, it becomes the guide, and it becomes the "seeker". Observations have found that at least there is this cooperative relationship between it and honey badgers. If the honeydew also has this kind of partnership with other mammals, you have to admit that they are a symbiotic relationship.
The breeding habits of the honeydew bird are very grotesque, very similar to the cuckoos in the Eastern Hemisphere and the Swallow Starlings in North America. Females lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, especially in toucan nests, because toucans can peck a hole in trees like woodpeckers, which is very habitable. Once successfully invaded, the adult honey bird will bite through the original owner's egg, so that when the chicks hatch, only the offspring of the occupier are left in the nest. The two species that can guide honey to humans, the common honey guide bird and the scaly-throated honey bird chicks, both have sharp curved hooks on their upper and lower beaks, and scientists speculate that their role may be used to peck competitors and drive their owners' chicks out of their nests. These hooks fall off automatically as soon as they fly out of the nest.