Study finding underscores unique relationship between humans and honeyguides

Submitted by NATALIA HALL on FRI, 07/22/2016 - 10:59

An African bird known as Greater honeyguide is well known for leading people to honey, and as per a latest study the birds pay attention to some particular human calls to determine who wants to play follow-the-leader. The discovery has underscored the unique relationship that humans and this wild bird share.

Claire Spottiswoode of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom said that they are certainly neither domesticated nor coerced in any way. Spottiswoode added that the birds aren’t taught in any conventional way also. Of course, humans won’t intentionally visit them and train honeyguides.

When Spottiswoode was just an 11-year-old kid in Cape Town, South Africa, she heard of the honeyguide while she went for a meeting of her local bird club and come across a lecture from a scientist dubbed H.A. Isack, the pioneer of honeyguide studies.

He published a rigorous study in the journal Science in 1989 demonstrating that the legends regarding the honeyguide were real. The birds indeed flutter in front of people, tweet, and fly from a tree to another, guiding hunters to the bees’ nests present within the trunks of hollow trees.

Spottiswoode mentioned, “By following honeyguides, human honey hunters can really increase their rate of finding bees nests”.

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Warming friendship: A man and a penguin forge a bond over thousands of miles

Published March 09, 2016

Fox News Latino

A Chinese proverb says that when you save a life, you’re forever responsible for it. And so it goes with a widowed fisherman, living on a remote beach in Brazil and his small but loyal feathered friend.

He calls him Jinjing, and without fail, the Magellanic penguin returns, like the prodigal son, after disappearing for days, weeks and even months to reconnect with the retired bricklayer, Joao Pereira de Souza — the human who saved his life.

The relationship was forever bonded in 2011, when de Souza found the oil-soaked bird lying on a beach by his shady home in Rio de Janeiro state. De Souza, 71, fed the bird sardines and enticed it to drink water.

Jinjing is a term of endearment in parts of Brazil, and not unlike a dog, the penguin never lets de Souza down – and even manages to perform his penguin duties.

Once a year, Jingjing joins thousands of other Magellanic penguins and migrates some 2,000 miles south to the Patagonia region during breeding season, which lasts from early September through February. And then he always comes back to the warm stretch of sand in Proveta, in southeast Brazil.

“When he returns he’s so happy to see me,” Mr. de Souza told The Wall Street Journal. “He comes up to my neck and hoots,” he added.

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