Okay, but can a bird really cooperate with humans?
5/21/202633 min
E23. Across sub-Saharan Africa, wild birds and people work together to find honey. No taming, no breeding, no domestication… just a partnership thousands of years in the making. Behavioral ecologist Dr. Jessica van der Wal, FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, joins Scott to unpack what's actually happening when a honey hunter calls and a greater honeyguide answers.
In this episode you'll hear about:
- What each side gets out of one of the only known mutualisms between humans and a wild animal, and why this bird in particular evolved to seek us out
- The remarkable signal the honeyguide uses to communicate with people, and what playback experiments revealed when researchers tested it across very different communities
- What happens to a partnership built over generations when one side starts buying honey at the store
All audio, video, and images in this episode are either original to Okay, But... Birds (© Okay Media, LLC) or used under license/permission from the respective rights holders. Bird media from the Macaulay Library is used courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology as follows:
- Greater Honeyguide audio contributed by Jennifer F. M. Horne, ML55972
Additional media courtesy of Dr. Claire Spottiswoode and Dr. Jessica van der Wal.
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsScott Taylor· Host0:00
The eating wax thing is weird. How many birds actually eat wax? Like, is this a really rare specialization, or is it more common?
Jessica van der Wal· Guest0:07
Yeah, it is quite a rare, uh, specialization.
Scott Taylor· Host0:09
Okay.
Jessica van der Wal· Guest0:10
Um, and it is very weird. I agree.
Scott Taylor· Host0:12
[laughs] Okay. [laughs] [upbeat music] Sometimes I feel like Douglas and I are cooperating. Douglas is my dog. He's a 37-pound mini Australian Labradoodle. I know, we're gay. He gets food, scritches, walks, two kinds of vegetables he demands with the enthusiasm of a two-year-old, who, like a two-year-old, will lose his mind if denied a carrot or a cucumber, and a level of medical attention that I am embarrassed to itemize. In return, I get companionship, joy, love, and so many low-grade anxieties about whether his stomach is doing okay today. Mutualism, both sides win, even when one side is silently catastrophizing about the other side's poop. Here's the part I think about: Douglas and a gray wolf share somewhere between 98.8 and 99.9% of their DNA, functionally identical, and yet Douglas, a creature that has been bred down to the size of a footstool and answers to the command "spin"- Spin ... always to the right, thanks to my friend Jay,