The male superb lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae) is a king of avian karaoke, notorious for his vocal mimicry.
A clip from David Attenborough’s The Life of Birds, featuring a lyrebird riffing on a chainsaw, kookaburra and car alarm, has been viewed on YouTube more than 22 million times. We’re told the lyrebird’s extraordinary skills evolved in his quest for mates. What’s not mentioned is that the lyrebird’s paramour shares these mimetic skills. Females are capable of freestyling their own complex songs but, until recently, no humans had noticed.
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There has been a longstanding androcentric bias in birdsong study, dating back to Darwin. The melodious calls of songbirds such as the superb lyrebird are a textbook example of sexual selection: a male ornament evolving to be ever more elaborate over generations of male competition and female choice.
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Much like Victorian ladies at a dinner party, female songbirds had no reason to compete. Hushed by Darwin’s theory, their role was simply to listen to the jazzy showmanship of the cocks and reward their favourites with sex. Females caught singing were written off as babbling freaks. Their calls fell on deaf scientific ears, brushed aside with excuses: female vocalisations were the result of a ‘hormonal imbalance’ or simply a non-adaptive by-product of shared development with the male.
This was the story with the female superb lyrebird until Anastasia Dalziell, leader of Australia’s Lyrebird Lab, heard different. In 2014, out in the field, she noticed a series of distinct lyrebird calls, which she tracked back to females. Though lyrebird females could be mistaken for immature males, Dalziell recognised their sex from their wonky tails, bent from hours of nest-sitting.
Dalziell started tracking females and discovered they’re capable of sophisticated mimetic vocalisations. She counted 20 different species being impersonated and a host of other noises, some not even vocal, such as the sound of tree branches rubbing in the wind and the beating of bird wings.
Why has female lyrebird song evolved?
Unlike the male, their songs haven’t evolved to attract mates but to prevent rival females from stealing their territories and vandalising their nests.
Female superb lyrebirds are fiercely competitive. They’ll viciously attack their neighbours’ nests, which explains why they go to the effort of building more than one, to confuse their rivals and protect their offspring. Dalziell suspects vocal mimicry may have evolved for similar reasons. She recorded nesting females aping the calls of a grey goshawk, a known lyrebird predator. Crying wolf would deter rivals and keep chicks safe.
The lyrebird joins other female songbirds, such as the house wren, that also use complex vocalisations to protect their nests. These avian divas are challenging fundamental assumptions about birdsong evolution.
Do female songbirds sing?
Thanks to a consortium of feminist scientists, we now know that more than 70 per cent of female songbirds sing. This revelation is likely a factor of geographic bias as much as androcentrism. Songbirds were traditionally studied in the northern hemisphere, where females tend to be less vocal.
It’s a different story in Australia, where most female songbirds, like the lyrebird, are backyard belters. Given that songbirds evolved in Australia some 47 million years ago, it’s believed that females always sang. So, the question Darwin might have asked, down under, is not why males sing but why have some females lost their voices.
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Main image: a female superb lyrebird in Queensland, Australia/Getty