Although humans and birds are separated by millions of years of evolution, we share remarkable similarities in some of our behaviours. That is why we love them so much.
It is well known that birds like humans use song to communicate and educate their young. Now scientists studying superb fairy-wrens have discovered that, like humans, they are more likely to help family members in distress than strangers. The beloved Australian songbirds will risk life and limb for its breeding group but ignore cries for help from unfamiliar birds.
The study, from scientists at Monash University and the Australia National University, tracked the songbirds in their research to focus on understanding how animals that live in a multi-level society, like humans, decide to help one another when in need. The study tested this by placing a fake image of a predator, a kookaburra, close to groups of the fairy-wrens and then broadcasting a call of distress recorded from birds observed to be family members, acquaintances or strangers.
When a member of a superb fairy-wren’s family was supposedly being attacked, the researchers found it would put itself in harm’s way to distract the predator. The bird would raise an alarm call and then puff up its plumage and scurry around to divert the kookaburra’s attention. According to research published in the journal, Current Biology, the fairy-wren would still help an acquaintance who was not a family member but not as intensely. If the attacked superb fairy-wren was a total stranger, the cries for help would be ignored altogether.
Ettore Camerlenghi, the lead author of the study and a PhD candidate at Monash University, said that, like humans, fairy-wrens had a core social group.
“We found the wrens, like hunter-gatherers, have three distinct types of relations – those from the same breeding group, familiar individuals from the same community and unfamiliar birds from the wider population,” Camerlenghi said.
BirdLife Australia’s Sean Dooley said it was the complexity and quirkiness of superb fairy-wrens’ social lives that made the bird a favourite among Australians.
Superb fairy-wrens, found in south-eastern Australia, are well known for the ultraviolet blue that the male birds flaunt during spring. Female superb fairy-wrens sport the same brown and white plumage year-round.
Dooley said the birds are one of the most frequently encountered small bush birds in BirdLife Australia’s annual bird count, but the numbers were drastically declining in urban and outer-urban areas.
As I wrote earlier this year, a “city wrens” research project is underway in inner Melbourne aimed at tracking fairy-wren numbers and movements to determine what habitat they prefer in urban areas.
In Hobart, the blue wrens – as they are known here– are bucking the national trend of decline and are still very common. And as I watch them scamper across my lawn, I feel a little closer to them than ever before.