20 Songbirds
About this episode
Birdsong is never just a pretty sound. Nicholas Bishop from Zoos South Australia shares why birds make sounds and how to tune your ear to songbirds around Australia.
Episode illustration: Grey Butcherbird
Nicholas Bishop has worked in the zoo world for 20+ years, specialising in birds and animal behaviour. He has combined his background as an actor/singer with academic pursuits in performance arts, applied ornithology and wildlife management. As the Animal Behaviour and Creative Programs Manager at Zoos South Australia, Nicholas supports the animal training and storytelling programs at Adelaide Zoo and Monarto Safari Park. These programs focus on positive, innovative and engaging approaches to connecting people with nature and saving species from extinction.
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Kirsty: The guest in this episode is from Zoos South Australia. Adelaide Zoo is on the country of the Kaurna people and Monarto Safari Park is on the country of the Ngarrindjeri people. I would like to pay my respect to Elders past and present, acknowledging them as the Traditional Custodians of these lands.
Kirsty: Welcome to Weekend Birder. I'm Kirsty Costa and it's an honor to be learning about birdwatching with you. I'm sitting in Royal Park with Nicholas Bishop from Zoos South Australia. He's visiting Melbourne for a conference and is taking the time to share some of the things that he knows about birds and their songs. And boy, does he know a lot about birds! Here is how it all began for Nicholas.
Nicholas: I got interested in birds because I had neighbours who were interested in birds. I lived at the top of a street that ended with Seventh Creek, which flows down from Morialta National Park in the Adelaide foothills. My neighbours were market gardeners and agriculturists who kept birds in their backyards. My parents noticed when I was young that I was really interested in animals generally, but particularly interested in birds. So they made sure that I had a small aviary with Budgerigars in it to look after. Then my neighbours had things that just seemed to me to be the acme of exotic. John Fry, the market gardener, had aviaries of Lovebirds and I was fascinated with their chatter, their sociability and their energy. Rex Crowsy, the agriculturist who taught out of the Roseworthy campus of the University of Adelaide, he had Princess Parrots, Scarlet-chested Parrots, Gouldian Finches. And I would stand and just watch them for hours in his yard, directly abutted the Red River Gums that guarded that creek line, which, when I was a little boy some time ago now, was a creek line and hadn't had to make any concessions to civilisation. It hadn't been forced into being a practical drainage concern. It was a creek and every year there were rosellas nesting in the tree hollows and Rainbow Lorikeets gorging themselves on the nectar of the blossoms, kookaburras calling out their territorial cackles to each other and magpies caroling in the morning. That was basically my classroom where I learned the raw graft of being a curious bird nerd and ornithologist in the making.
Kirsty: As we've discovered in previous Weekend Birder episodes, birds make noises for pretty much the same reasons that humans do.
Nicholas: Birds are really no different. Isn't that exciting to know that two such very different vertebrates, two creatures with backbones like we are that are really though so different to each other, have a very similar purpose in the noises that we make! The purpose can be to say, "This is my patch. You stay over there and I'll stay here and everything's going to be great". It can also mean, "I'm in the best possible condition. The days are getting longer, they're getting warmer, and I think I need to reproduce. How about me as an option? Because the more complex and detailed and interesting my song, particularly in songbirds, the more that says about my health, my vigor, my ability as a potential mate". But it can also be about identifying threat. So certain calls or about saying, "Hey, heads up, everybody get down. There's a Brown Goshawk cruising through the district and it's not looking like he's having a leisurely time about it. He's on the prowl. Everybody get down!". So there are a range of sounds that inform that connect avian communities. And, you know, it's not just within species, it's between species as well. You may have birds that are actually learn to recognize the alarm calls of other birds and just take that as fair notice that it's time for them to scarper to get out of there as well.
Kirsty: Why do some birds make louder or more complex sounds than others? From his years of experience working with birds, Nicholas says that he's noticed that it's linked to how social they are and where they live.
Nicholas: We know in the passerines, or the perching songbirds that make up the biggest group of birds on the planet. If you think of it this way, songbirds like sparrows, Superb Fairywrens, lyre birds, our beloved Australian Magpie, butcherbirds - all of them belong to that huge, what we call order of birds. And within every order of birds there's a whole bunch of families. So if you think of it, it's pretty amazing that there's about 28-29 orders of birds and there's about 10,000 species of birds (in the world). But that one order of the passerines, or the perching songbirds as they're called in species and families, makes up half of all the birds on the planet. So it shows you what a successful lineage, what a successful bloodline family line on the bird family tree, the songbirds are, and they have a renown there, a great reputation for being able to produce extraordinary sound. And it seems to be the more evolved the avian brain is, the more it is into complex sound cadences or chains or song sequences, if you like. They serve a pretty detailed purpose within family groups. And I think the magpies and the butcherbirds are a great example of that. Particularly butcherbirds. There are some people who have studied intensely in great detail for most of their curious science lives, the songs of butcherbirds and have worked out that every clan has its own distinctive song cycle qualities. Other birds, though, don't tend to vocalise as much as that even within those pass around those perching songbird groups, because I live in different habitats as well. The way sound travels through the air has a lot to do with it in relation to where the bird lives. Birds that have complex songs with lots of waves that the sonogram might pick up (the gadget that records the song) tend to live in environments that have a need for the sound to travel long distances. Whereas simpler songs tend to belong to forest birds, where the sound needs to travel shorter distances and be less complex and less prone to being interrupted by all those blocks to the sound waves that might be in the environment. So that's a big influence. Some birds inherit the ability for songs and other birds teach their young those songs. If you look at one of the darlings of our Australian bird life, arguably I think the most fantastic Australian bird, the Budgerigar (the Budgie), they are able to pick up all sorts of variations in sound and it makes them therefore really good talkers. I had a Budgerigar that could say all sorts of great things. He could say, "To be or not to be, that is the question," and, "May the force be with you". Fantastic bird and because he has a particular structure in his voice box, in his syringes that allow him to do that, and a brain that's interested in picking up novel sound and building that into repertoire. Because if you can do that, you're impressive. That means you will be marked by a potential mate as being particularly smart, particularly tuned in to the environment. And if you're that tuned in to the environment, how might you therefore also apply that tuned fitness to being a great co-parent? So there's all kinds of reasons why songs are complex or why songs aren't. If you think about the gloriously gaudy, gorgeous Birds of Paradise of New Guinea, they have some of the harshest voices on the planet. They are not the operatic superstars of the bird world, but do they need to be? Look at what they've got going for them. All of their evolutionary energy has been poured into plumage of the most outrageous kinds of structures plumes, special feathers, gorget is what they call the lovely little shielded, iridescent patches on the throat. They're covered in inventive feathers from head to foot. Why would you need a great song if you look that gorgeous? Then you get the canary. A little finch from the Canary Islands off the coast of Spain, who has one of the most glorious songs on the planet. Plain bird in the wild - greenish bird streaked with a bit of yellow - has the most amazing, glorious sound that travels over the fields, over the rocky escarpments to other waiting canaries. No wonder that the canary has been pretty much a domesticated songbird for centuries now.
Kirsty: I don't know about you, but even though I've been listening to songbirds all my life, I really started to tune in to their sounds when I became a birdwatcher. Nicholas has some great advice about how you and I can start working out what they might be saying to each other.
Nicholas: I think a lot of what scientists know about birds and what they're saying to each other comes from watching birds in context, watching birds in their environment, watching what happens after songs are sung, watching for patterns. And what we call generalities in science that help us work out that birds that have amazingly complex songs are often fit whole territories and get very good mates. And so they can infer or they can determine or decide a lot from that. And that's a really exciting thing that we can find out what birds are saying to each other by looking at the whole picture of the birds behavior in the environment. But if we're talking about alarm calls, for example, you only need to be in a piece of Australian woodland walking along. Think of a summer strewn bushland morning and you hear one bird give an alarm call and you hear everybody else fall silent. That's how you know that something is meaningful to not only that Bird's mates, but also all the other birds in the district. And when you hear in the forests of, say, the Noosa Hinterland around the Cooroy district where I spend a bit of time, and you hear the birds there and you know that the call is antiphonal, which means that the male calls one section of the song and the female calls back. So you've got that whip cracking call followed by another pulse of sound. I've watched whipbirds together working the forest at the back of my mate's place and seen the male do the first section and the female do the second section and watch the way that they forage in tandem with each other and stay in touch. But even the harsh, raucous voices of parrots, the nerve tearing call of a Sulphar-crested Cockatoo... if that bird is noticing a goanna coming up towards its nest cavity in a Red Gum that's got its seasonal investment, those young silver cockatoo chicks in it, it's going to throw up its crest throughout its wings, flare its tail and screech as loudly as possible. Noise, therefore, is part of the battle cry. It's part of a deterrent. It's a weapon to deter that goanna. But notice the context. It's coupled with the crest, the wings, the tail. It's an overall picture thing. And I think that's one of the things that I encourage all of us passionate bird nerds out there to do is to see the sound of birds in context and to also remember that when we're birdwatching. It's a multisensory experience. If you've got an opportunity to get out there in the bush and you're excited like I am to be in a new patch of bushland and you've done a bit of research and you know that it's vibrating with promise of seeing amazing bird creatures. Remember that it's not just about fantastic binoculars (which I have and I adore) it's about using your ears as well. It's not just about seeing. And very often you'll hear before you see one of the really cool things now too, is that to practise getting your ear in as the bird nerds say. We have really good devices now, apps that have great content on them. And the one that I use has a sound recording for pretty much every Australian bird. Sometimes at night to wind down, I just go through my Australian birds on my app because I want to get my ear in. I know that the next time I go out into the bush, I'll be that much more prepared, that much richer for having got my ear trained into those sounds. That's a really joyous thing. It's great when you can walk into a patch of bushland and start to name birds before you've even seen them. So encouraging everybody out there to remember to get their ear in as well.
Kirsty: I'm starting to train my ear by listening to birds like I listen to the patterns of melody in music. Does the melody pulse in short, staccato sounds? Does the melody tone go up and then go down? Does the bird sing lower bass notes or is it more of a soprano that likes to sing higher notes? Nick does a similar thing and he says that this has helped him quickly identify birds like the Grey Shrikethrush.
Nicholas: I've lived around Grey Shrikethrushes in a number of places of Australia. I had one that used to visit my back patio when I was working at Alice Springs Desert Park in the free flight there. I've had them around me in the Adelaide Hills. I see them regularly at Monarto Safari Park when I work there, when I go down to watch dolphins in the port estuary, there's a couple of Grey Shrikethrushes that come around me. They're out of the mangroves, so a bird that clearly is pretty good at saying yes to opportunity across a wide variety of habitats. But what is so stunning about it is that their sound is always something that announces their presence, often way before I see them. This whistling cadence, it often goes {bird call}. The other family that I think of are the Australian Whistlers - Rufous Whistlers, Golden Whistlers. I'm about to go up to Waikerie for a bird banding workshop in October, and I hope to see my first Red Lord and Gilbert's Whistlers geeking out there. They also have that same style of pulsing cadences. There's then also the charming, what I call tinkling reel of the Superb Gairywren that has that lovely conversational, descending, tinkling chatter that they're having with each other. And then the other one that I think is a great charm to all of us in suburban Australia is the monarch of the Hills Hoist that's often out there on the clothesline in the backyard, the Willie Wagtail. And one of the calls that I really like of theirs that's highly recognisable is when they're telling another Willie Wagtail off or a magpie or a backyard dog and going, Isn't it glorious that through listening, through tuning in. The more you do it, the more your brain will move in that direction, because the brain is a glorious thing that tends to head in the direction of your intention. It tends to actually sensitize to whatever you motivate in the direction of, and it begins to catalogue recognition of song. So it's a really handy thing to start to pay attention. And if you can see birds offering sound, making sound right in front of you, all the better.
Nicholas: And what's really great now is we've got these iPhones that allow us to film. So if you're really close to a bird and let's face it, in some of our parklands and some of our woodland reserves, birds are pretty confident and they'll sit there right in front of you and produce sound. It's a place down in the Otways that I love to visit. I love going through the forest there, particularly in the morning and listening to the contact notes of the Eastern Yellow Robin. And it's very simple. It's a bird that can produce quite lovely, complex song. But first thing in the day, when the male and the female have come off the roost, they've woken up that first moment of the day. They start to go, "Chop chop, chop chop," to each other and it can be in a piece of woodland and here that can go in the company of the Eastern Yellow Robins. And even knowing that means that you roll your film inside your inner cinema of that species. Because the brain's ability to do this thing called a neural pairing, to imagine and visualize in the context of a situation that it's in is a really powerful, enriching tool for us to have as a species. So not only do you hear the sound, but you can visualize the species and tick it off your inner bird list for the area that morning.
Kirsty: Nicholas has worked in the zoo world for over 20 years and he specializes in birds and animal behavior. He combines his talents as an actor and singer with his qualifications in performance arts, applied ornithology and wildlife management. He is the Animal Behavior and Creative Programs Manager at Zoos South Australia, which is affectionately known as Zoos SA.
Nicholas: Zoos SA helps wild birds superbly well at Monarto Safari Park because it's the largest zoological site in Australasia. And the great thing about that site is that it has large amounts of unspoilt mallee woodland habitat and as a result we have a thriving complex bird biodiversity. That means there's lots of birds of many different types in the one spot. And for any of you out there that are curious about how we measure the health of an environment, just look for the numbers of birds. If you've got a good cross-section of different bird species that often directly relates to how complex and healthy the ecosystem is, and we see that at Monarto. In Adelaide it's different, in fact, we're Australia's smallest zoo. So we have the smallest city zoo and the largest country zoo. We're only eight hectares right on the Torrens River. But you know, what's been really heartening in recent times is that we've seen species turn up seasonally in the winter. And the one that really sticks in my mind is the breathtaking Eastern Spinebill - a very beautiful, tiny honeyeater with an elegantly curved spine like bill with shades of chocolate, creamy apricot. And that has a lovely, pulsing little call. First thing in the day, we have a couple of pairs down there, and one of them likes to sit right up on top of the education building, which is planted out as a native bushland-tinted habitat, and there is a bare tree and it sits right up there and we call that a staging post for birds where they will sit up in a high environment like that and call. You think that's very gutsy for a tiny bird like that, isn't it? "Here I am. I'm not surrounded by any foliage. Everybody can see me and I'm boldly calling out!". And I love to see that they come into the zoo grounds and they hang out in that spot because just outside our vet centre is a bunch of grevilleas that are full of flower at that time and they tend to spend their time in there. New Holland Honeyeaters, we get Brown Goshawks and Collared Sparrowhawks actually hunting in the zoo because we have Crested Pigeons. We have of course a colony of White Ibis that live in the zoo as well. We get a strong family group of magpies, Eastern Rosellas, Adelaide Rosellas. We have galahs coming through, Sulphur-crested Cockatoos, Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos.... the list goes on. Pardalotes - they are the most glorious birds, tiny Striated Pardalotes. They nest in the little cracks in the mortar in our beautiful heritage building Minchin House there. In the season, they will make a little nest in the cavities of that building and nest in there. Over time we've had rosellas nest in there, we've had Red-rumped Parrots. Zoos that have complex habitats and resources tend to be sinkholes for avian diversity. And the best thing is we've recently had some Superb Fairywrens move into the area just at the back of the bird apartment adjacent to the Way of the Panda. So that makes bird nerds like me punch the air with joy.
Kirsty: In his job, Nicholas supports the animal training and storytelling programs at Adelaide Zoo and Monarto Safari Park. These programs focus on positive, innovative and engaging approaches to connecting people with nature and saving species from extinction.
Nicholas: A good thing is to that we have great partnerships and we work in tandem with our other zoos like Zoos Victoria. And we've just recently entered the Plains-wanderer program, but we also want to work with the Mallee Emu-wren. And to that end we've been working with what we call an analogue species, or you maybe call it a practice or rehearsal species called the Rufous-crowned Emu-wren, and we've been working out how to breed them. So when we get Mallee Emu-wrens, we're able to have a pretty fair idea about how their reproduction will work. So we do have strategies for breeding them as part of our cooperative network of zoo families working together to save the other fauna of Australia. When I first started my career, it was on a three month contract to support another keeper who was getting breeding season set up for the Regent Honeyeater program. And we've worked with that species since and indeed the Orange-bellied Parrot, the Swift Parrot. It's so important to understand that what zoos can do when they work on the stud book of a species like the Orange-bellied Parrot, is to understand at a really detailed scientific level where all the genes for the most. A brilliant genetic vigour will be because genes need to be operating in the healthiest environments possible in order for populations of birds to be the healthiest populations possible. So the kind of work we do in zoos with Orange-bellied Parrots, for instance, really helps us determine what are the best pairings and how can we get the best quality chicks from those pairings. And then what can we do with them to cooperate with other zoos to exchange genetic material? But also in the case of the Orange-bellied Parrot, bring some of those individuals into release programs that keep that species going in their wild range.
Nicholas: And what's been really exciting with Orange-bellied Parrots (or OBPs as we affectionately call them), is that birds that have been bred in captive circumstances have actually done the complete migration from the mainland of Victoria down into Tasmania and back and have also started mating. That's fantastic when you think about what a super hero that little bird is, it even blows your mind more because the Orange-bellied Parrot is smaller than a pet budgie. It's it's about the same size as a wild budgie, perhaps just a little bit bigger. And imagine this. Imagine you're that bird and you've got to fly 200 kilometres across one of the most treacherous stretches of ocean on the planet, Bass Strait from southern Victoria down into Tasmania. And you're basically the size of a budgie and that's 200 kilometres. There is a pretty amazing reason to admire that species and they do that twice a year. So when we consider the whole story, it just fires us up and inspires us to be even more committed to what that species needs from us.
Nicholas: Zoos do amazing things. There have been many species that have been saved from the brink of extinction by zoos. A big example is the Californian Condor. If it hadn't been for the remaining California Condors being brought into captivity and bred using really careful, sophisticated techniques, being very careful not to imprint them onto humans, that species now wouldn't be flying in Californian skies. That's such an amazing thing that humans can do that we have the ability to say to another animal, "Hey, I'll give you a hand. I'm going to come in here and I'm going to help you out and I'm going to get you back into the wild". Sometimes you have to have a long term vision about that as well. For some species, the clock's ticking so we need to act as fast as we have been. Or in some instances faster than we are. And sometimes we don't know until scientists go out there into the field and find out. That is why those cooperative programs that we have with researchers out in the field and also doing our own research and employing our own Field Ecologists, scientists who study nature out in the field. That's why it's so important for us to have all of those elements working because those birds rely on us.
Kirsty: Many thanks to Nicholas for sharing his knowledge about the music of songbirds and how ZoosSA is protecting birds in the wild. I've added some links to the notes for this episode if you would like to find out more about bird songs and the work of Zoos SA. Recordings of the Grey Butcherbird and Grey Strikethrush were uploaded by Nick Talbot on Xeno-canto website. And many thanks to everyone who's been leaving a rating and a review on Apple iTunes or telling their mates about Weekend Birder. This little podcast is growing so quickly and it's all because of you.
