How Mozambicans “talk” to birds to form hunting partnerships

It’s very rare, but it still happens. Listen to the recruitment call that residents of villages in northern Mozambique make to summon the honeyguide.

In the villages of northern Mozambique, there are still people who “talk” to birds to find honey.

A recent study shows that honey hunter communities in the Niassa Special Reserve, in Meculause different “dialects” of calls to cooperate with a specific wild bird, the largest honeybird or honeyguide (Indicator indicator).

In this rare partnership established between people and non-domesticated animals, hunters resort to two main types of vocalizations, according to the study on January 21st in British Ecological Society.

The first vocalizations are recruiting calls and are used to attract the bird and start the hunting session; the second ones are coordination callswhich allow you to maintain contact while the honey guide guides humans to a beehive.

Along the route, the bird indicates the direction and insists that the group follow it, in a kind of continuous “negotiation” mediated by sound, as compared to . Once the hive is located, hunters use smoke to calm the bees and collect the honey.

The honeyguide doesn’t leave with ‘wings flapping’: it uses the remains. It consumes the wax and larvae, with the help of the human hand.

Although this is a new study, it is not the first to highlight the teamwork between Mozambicans and these birds. And the connection doesn’t come from just now: it’s ancient, according to , which noted similar collaboration in Tanzania and Kenya.

This is not even the first study carried out in the Niassa Special Reserve. One from 2016 had already shown that, with the help of these birds, hunters have more than three times more likely of finding a hive than when searching alone.

Another investigation, in 2023 in Science, showed that it is not just humans who learn to attract the help of these birds. Little flyers also go through a learning process.

But the new study suggests that this cooperation is shaped by culture. The researchers recorded the calls of 131 hunters in 13 villages in Niassa and compared the similarities between communities. They discovered that neighboring villages tend to use more similar calls and that more distant villages exhibited greater differences. More or less like what happens with regional variations in human speech.

The variation results mainly from socially transmitted cultural processes, and not determined by the habitat, the researchers emphasize.

The lead author of the new study, Jessica Van Der Walfurther explains that these birds “cannot learn from their parents, because they are brood parasites: like cuckoos, they lay their eggs in other birds’ nests”, but that “they can learn by observing other honeyguides interacting with humans.”

“Humans learn and maintain the local cues necessary to cooperate with honeyguides, and honeyindicators, in turn, are likely learning and thus helping to reinforce these local human dialects – just as they learn large-scale variations in human cues across Africa that are more similar to different human languages,” adds the senior author of the study (and already involved in previous studies on honeyguides). Claire Spottiswoodefrom the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town, who leads the research project on these birds.

Here is the Hadzabe tribe, in Tanzania, calling and collecting honey with the bird: