150 Honeyeaters at Dawn
About this episode
Honeyeaters don’t just sing at dawn - they listen. In our 150th episode, Andrew Skeoch returns to share what he’s learnt about honeyeater songs, and how they reveal something deeper about birds, place and belonging.
Birds featured: New Holland Honeyeater, Spiny-cheeked Honeyeater, Yellow-tufted Honeyeater, White-eared Honeyeater
Episode illustration: White-eared Honeyeater
Andrew Skeoch is a professional wildlife sound recordist, acoustic ecologist and author of ‘Deep Listening to Nature’. Over the last 30 years, he has documenting the sounds of environments around the planet, and through his label 'Listening Earth', published over one hundred recordings allowing listeners to immerse themselves in wild soundscapes from around the world. His recordings have been heard in documentaries, installations and feature films such as Peter Gabriel's soundtrack to 'Rabbit Proof Fence’. He has given presentations to audiences ranging from local community and naturalist groups to university students. He’s appeared at festivals such as WOMADelaide’s Planet Talks, written for The Conversation, and presented radio features, keynote addresses and a TEDx talk. He is the president of the Australian Wildlife Sound Recoding Group, and on the board of the Australian Forum for Acoustic Ecology.
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Kirsty Costa [00:00:00]
This episode was recorded on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in central Victoria. I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and to the generations of people who have listened closely to this landscape for tens of thousands of years, noticing birds, seasons and the changing rhythms of Country.Welcome to episode 150 of Weekend Birder. I'm Kirsty Costa, and I honestly cannot believe I'm saying those words out loud.
When I first started this little podcast, I never imagined that thousands of people from around the world would end up listening in each week. It still completely blows my mind that this community exists, and I'm so very grateful that you're part of it.
And because this is a milestone episode, I wanted to bring back a fan favourite. Andrew Skeoch is a professional wildlife sound recordist, acoustic ecologist, and the author of a book called Deep Listening to Nature. Over the last 30 years, Andrew has documented the sounds of environments around the planet, and many Weekend Birder listeners will remember him from episode 117, where he shared what he's learnt from years of listening to the dawn chorus.
And somewhere in all of that listening, Andrew started noticing something remarkable about honeyeaters and the way that they shape the Australian landscape.
Andrew Skeoch [00:01:32]
Going back to when I was first recording, I'd be travelling around the country making sound recordings, and I just assumed that being a nature recordist, you have to get up in the morning to record the dawn chorus. It's just part of the gig.I'd be spending a lot of time recording dawn choruses, and one of the things that I loved was the aesthetics of the honeyeater dawn chorus, because each species seems to have a simple little song. And when you get a group of them all roosting collectively within earshot of each other, you get this really beautiful dawn singing pattern.
And it's not something that, you know, when I first started travelling overseas, I realised this is a really uniquely Australian thing. You don't get this kind of sonic patterning in dawn choruses in, say, Asia or Europe. And so that got me curious about honeyeater dawn songs.
And I also realised that that patterning aesthetically, pleasingly to the ear, works because wherever I was in the country, it seemed to be one species that was doing the calling. And hence you'd get this one species doing its simple dawn song, and you'd get this bouncing of sound in the landscape.
It took me a while to pick up on that and confirm that, you know, I think this is a common thing. This seems to be what goes on. And I realised that there's a refinement to that, which is that it's not just one species of honeyeater that you hear in the dawn chorus.
So what I realised is that honeyeaters come in these various sizes. You get the smaller honeyeaters around the country, White-naped and Black-chinned and Brown-headed and so on. Then you get the elegant honeyeaters, which are the mid-sized green species like the White-plumed. Then larger ones, the wattlebirds, the friarbirds.
There's also the New Holland and White-cheeked Honeyeaters, which are in a separate genus, and the White-fronted Honeyeaters. So those honeyeaters are in a separate group as well.
And what I realised is that in the dawn chorus, you tend to get one of those genera singing in any one place. Even though there might be multiple examples of, say, the smaller honeyeaters in the landscape, it tends to be one that you hear. And that really puzzled me for a little while.
Kirsty Costa [00:04:14]
Andrew has nearly 25 years of recordings from around his home in central Victoria, and over time he's noticed that the honeyeaters have changed, not just the number of birds, but which species are leading.Andrew Skeoch [00:04:26]
When we first moved here, around 1999, we had Yellow-tufted Honeyeaters in abundance around our house. They were just everywhere. I just thought, well, there are honeyeaters there. They're the dominant honeyeater.But I also realised there are other honeyeaters around. There were Fuscous, White-eared, Yellow-faced, but it was the Yellow-tufted that dominated the dawn chorus. They were the ones that were really present in the dawn chorus around our home.
And that continued for about 15 years, the first 15 years that we lived here. And then I started thinking, I haven't seen a Yellow-tufted Honeyeater for a couple of days. And then it became, I haven't seen one for a couple of weeks. And I'm listening to the dawn chorus and I'm just not hearing them. It's like, where have they gone? What's going on here?
I've been listening back through my recordings. I've got recordings from September of 2015 when the Yellow-tufted are in full song. The whole group of them are there singing in the dawn chorus.
I've got another recording from two months later, and they are completely absent. The only thing that you can hear from honeyeaters is a very, very distant White-plumed Honeyeater. And I think I'm hearing a honeyeater that's probably down on the river flats. We're up on the ridge here, so I'm hearing it maybe a kilometre away.
For the next few months, I wasn't getting any honeyeaters in our dawn chorus. And then I started getting a few Yellow-faced Honeyeaters. The Brown-headed started to become a little bit more vocally noticeable.
The next year, the Yellow-faced weren't so present. But suddenly we'd got White-eared turning up, and they started forming a dawn chorus. And that first year there was only one bird singing. But the following year there were two or three singing, and they started doing this counter-singing that we've talked about before, listening to each other as much as they're singing, alternating their songs.
And for the next couple of years, that population built up. Around about 2019, having never had them here before, suddenly New Hollands turned up and they started integrating themselves into the dawn chorus. And that pattern has continued right through until now.
The other bird, of course, we have is the Red Wattlebird, and also the Brown-headed tended to be quite vocal as well.
So what I'm hearing is that the species of honeyeater that is particularly noticeable, that is creating these beautiful patterns, has changed over the years. And this mirrors movements of populations of birds.
Kirsty Costa [00:08:05]
Listening to Andrew's two recordings side by side feels a little bit like listening to ecological history unfold in real time.I'm wondering if the changes in bird populations is related to habitat changes. Andrew says he doesn't think that this is the case.
Andrew Skeoch [00:08:21]
The bush here hasn't changed. There's no pattern to the landscape that I can pick that is mirroring this or possibly would explain this movement of birds.And what I've concluded is that it's not the birds that are moving around and creating this dawn chorus, it's the requirements of their dawn chorus singing that's moving the birds.
What they need to do in the dawn chorus is sing to affirm their local community, their local population that they belong to, this little group of birds that is all roosting within earshot of each other. And that is best achieved when a species group are, in acoustic terms, having their own little space to do that dawn singing.
And so as I move around the country, everywhere I go, I've come across a different genus, different species of birds singing in the dawn. And they're doing that to differentiate themselves. It's an acoustic differentiation geographically, and I just think this is a really extraordinary thing.
And it explains why, or it fits in with this understanding of the dawn chorus as being a negotiation of important relationships. But it's such a neat way that they do it. And to see that it actually moves them around the landscape is quite extraordinary.
There's a little coda to this story, which is that I thought that the Yellow-tufted Honeyeaters had disappeared from around our home, and I was speaking to others locally who said, no, they're still in the landscape. And I'd come across them out in the bush. But I found where our local population of Yellow-tufted had gone to. They'd moved about 150 metres away into an adjoining gully line. They're still there. Smaller group, but yeah.
Kirsty Costa [00:10:21]
One of the things that I've learned over 150 episodes of this podcast is that knowing your local birds and their habitats really enables you to learn in lots of different ways. And that birdwatching is as much about listening as it is about watching.Andrew Skeoch [00:10:37]
It's knowing a place, but it's also recognising the importance of sound.It's not just important to us that we listen and we recognise species and perhaps what they're doing, but to understand that communication for birds is absolutely pivotal to their lives. And the requirements of communication, the way that that communication is undertaken, the purposes of it, shape other behaviours.
So the sound actually tells you a lot about what that species is doing. It's not just, oh, there's a White-eared Honeyeater. That's a good starting point. To understand that these honeyeaters are actually, their lives are shaped by their vocalising, their communicating, is a powerful insight.
Kirsty Costa [00:11:28]
The more closely you pay attention to birds, the more complicated and fascinating they become.And here, listener friend, we're actually going to go full circle, because back at the start of season four, episode 119, Amanda Lamont talked about the call of the Spiny-cheeked Honeyeater at Mungo National Park in south-western New South Wales. There, she said this honeyeater's call sounded different to other places in Australia, and when she heard it, she knew that she was at Mungo. Andrew's research backs Amanda's experience.
Andrew Skeoch [00:11:59]
As I travel around the country, you hear spinies in different populations giving very different songs. And what I've realised is that each local population has their own song. And so what they are doing is creating a sonic identity as a form of bonding, of belonging to that local community.In 2023, I think I was up in southern Queensland and I had the opportunity to drive down the road to Bourke, which goes through some pretty remote area. I'd last been there 20 years ago, and I'd recorded a spiny singing there at dawn that had such a different song. I didn't even recognise it as a spiny at the time.
Coming back 20 years later, I wanted to go to that same spot and see whether I could hear that same population of honeyeaters. And I couldn't quite find the location. I ended up camping about 15 kilometres away from where I'd recorded. I recorded spinies that morning, and they had a similar but noticeably different song.
After I had finished listening to the dawn chorus, I drove on a bit further, and I found the spot where I'd been 20 years beforehand. I did a bit more recording, and the spinies there had exactly the same song that I'd heard 20 years ago.
And so what that told me was that over distances of maybe only a few tens of kilometres, 15 kilometres in this case, the songs were quite different or noticeably different, whereas the fidelity of song over decades was maintained by a population.
So the subtlety and sophistication of this dawn singing, and the importance of it, I suppose, is reflected in this kind of experience of listening to these birds.
Kirsty Costa [00:14:09]
Andrew has shared some of his other Spiny-cheeked Honeyeater recordings with us. Want to have a listen?This recording was taken at Wyperfeld National Park in northern Victoria on Wergaia Country.
This Spiny-cheeked Honeyeater was calling at Burra in Queensland on Gunggari Country.
And this one was heard at Norseman in Western Australia on Ngadju Country.
Andrew Skeoch [00:14:47]
Once you get your ear in for it, it becomes so obvious.And of course, the reason that they're able to do this is that they are song-learning species. They are passerine songbirds, and so they're learning from each other. Their local song is constantly being reinforced and relearned, and they all sing exactly the same song. They practise it word perfect, note perfect.
Kirsty Costa [00:15:21]
The varied calls of the Spiny-cheeked Honeyeater has sparked Andrew's curiosity about a specific honeyeater that lives at his home on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in central Victoria, the White-eared Honeyeater.The White-eared Honeyeater is found in forests and woodlands across south-eastern Australia. It has olive-grey feathers, yellow panels on its wings and a striking white patch behind its eye that gives it its name.
White-eared Honeyeaters are known for their rich and musical dawn song, and about six months ago, Andrew and his wife invited me up to their property to listen to these birds at dawn.
So imagine you're standing next to me in the pre-dawn light in a shrubby woodland. Andrew is in front of us, sound recording equipment and a large microphone in his hand. He points suddenly to a tree nearby, and we hear what Andrew calls the honeyeater's bubble song.
Did you hear it? It's different to their usual call that sounds like choo choo choo. Let's listen again.
Andrew Skeoch [00:16:41]
When you were with me, I got my eyes on a male bird singing at the top of the bush and realised, firstly, it is actually the male doing that soft bubble song. But it really confirmed for me that he is singing to the female. She's the only one within earshot that could hear that really soft, intimate call.And at the end of the dawn chorus, she emerged from the bush that they'd both been roosting in overnight, and she flew off. And immediately, he got very animated with his little bubble, doo doo doo doo doo doo, when she emerged, and then stopped as soon as she flew off.
So in my understanding of what was going on with that vocalisation, it's the male affirming his bond with the female that he's been roosting with overnight, as well as doing the regular dawn chorus thing, which is calling out to his neighbours and listening back for their responses and so on.
Kirsty Costa [00:17:43]
You don't need recording equipment to be able to hear this bubble song, and Andrew says that White-eared Honeyeaters aren't the only honeyeaters that do it.Andrew Skeoch [00:17:51]
That bubble song that I'm hearing in the White-eared, Spiny-cheeked do it as well. If you listen carefully, you hear them doing this really soft, not all the time, but just every now and again, doop doop doop doop doop doop, in between their main song phrases.Once again, you only hear this at dawn. You don't hear this throughout the rest of the day. But there are other honeyeaters that do it as well. I've recorded White-plumed Honeyeaters doing it, and a colleague has said Yellow-plumed Honeyeaters also do it.
So how widespread it is within the Meliphagidae, the honeyeaters, I don't know. But it's really interesting that this family of birds, at least among some of its members and different genera too, has developed this intimate song between the roosting pair. Fascinating.
Kirsty Costa [00:18:56]
I guess Andrew is reminding you and I that there's always another layer to birds. Another sound, another behaviour, and another life story unfolding that we haven't fully noticed yet.Andrew Skeoch [00:19:08]
Singing in the dawn chorus is inherited as part of the bird's DNA, that they do this. But the way that they do it is collaborative, that they listen to each other, they learn from each other, they respond to each other.Their behaviours of singing, not only singing but listening, the kind of spaces that they have in their repertoire for doing that listening, is very sophisticated. They're not just jamming. They're like classical musicians. They're getting it absolutely spot on, because otherwise the communication process doesn't work properly.
And coming back to what I was saying earlier about the Yellow-tufted here and the White-eared, it is so important that it's done in a particular way that it actually shapes other things in their behaviour, such as where they actually live, their place in the landscape.
Kirsty Costa [00:20:05]
Every day, no matter where you live in Australia, the sounds of birds can be heard just before the sun rises.As the president of the Australian Wildlife Sound Recording Group and a board member of the Australian Forum for Acoustic Ecology, and as someone who has worked extensively overseas, Andrew says that the Australian dawn chorus, especially with its honeyeaters, is unlike any other.
Andrew Skeoch [00:20:27]
You just don't hear this overseas. You hear different things, virtuosity and soloing and so on, but you don't get that patterning.So I think nature really pointed me in this direction of being interested in what we're hearing in this country.
Kirsty Costa [00:20:45]
If you're a global listener, I hope you can come and visit us soon so you can enjoy the amazing dawn chorus here in Australia. And if you live in Australia, I hope this episode has helped you better understand and appreciate honeyeaters and the other birds that communicate with each other at the start of each day.Many thanks to Andrew for sharing his knowledge, his recordings and his extraordinary listening skills with us. I've placed links to Andrew's website and his book Deep Listening to Nature in the show notes, which are also on the Weekend Birder website.
What a way to celebrate 150 episodes.
Thank you so much for every message, every topic suggestion, every kind five-star review, every social media comment, every shared bird photo, every time you've told a friend about the show, and every time you've popped your headphones on and gone for a walk with me. It has genuinely meant so much.
Next up, we're wrapping season four with something really special, an Ask Us Anything episode featuring some very special guests answering your questions about birds, birdwatching and Weekend Birder. It's going to be lots of fun.
Speak to you again soon.
