7:26AM, AUGUST 4, 2014
Sometimes it pays to keep a bully close, even when he’s a lying thief.
Fork-tailed drongos are the bullies in this sub-Saharan story. These birds are masterful deceivers that can mimic the warning noises of 45 or so other birds and animals, sending their victims running and letting the drongos steal a meal. Susan Milius noted in Science News earlier this year:
[W]hen the birds hustle to steal food, they mimic alarms of other species more than 40 percent of the time — and use the victim’s own species’ alarms more often than another target’s. The mimicry works. [R]esearchers played various recorded false alarms for birds called pied babblers, a frequent target of the drongos’ fraud. Mimicked alarm calls of the babblers or of another bird distracted the babblers for longer than plain drongo alarms.
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