The Drongo - Sentinels & Tricksters

The bird mood continues....

My first introduction to the Drongo was during a road trip to Bidar, the first road trip that Diksha and I did by ourselves. Luckily for us the resort manager was a big time bird buff, and as the resort was totally vacant, but for us, he suggested a bird watching trek... and we jumped at it. We identified over forty birds, and it was a wonderful experience.

While I continued my interest through the little birds that visit my garden, Diksha took it to another level. She joined the bird watching club in college, and did several bird watching forays on weekends. Last week she attended a seminar on the Drongo, and what she told me was so fascinating, that I had to put it in here.

A Drongo, this little bird up here, can mimic the calls of 52 different species...... and what's more, individual drongos can remember as many as 32 calls.

Drongos often alert other animals to the presence of predators by mimicing their alarm calls, of not just birds but also little mammals. For instance in the kalahari desert of Africa, they are seen to mimic the meerkats to warn them of approaching predators.

But then, they also use the same trick to get themselves a quick meal. Even when there is no approaching predator, when they see the meerkat with some nice wriggly geckos, they use false alarms to scare the meerkat into dropping the food and scurrying away, when they swoop down for the gecko themselves.

Drongos get as much as 23 percent of their daily food using this type of trickery, according to a study published this week in Science.

In the study, the researchers found that by switching up their calls, the drongos were able to keep fooling duped targets. If they kept using the same call, the other animals would soon learn better, perhaps viewing the drongos as the "boy who cried wolf." But drongos are clever enough to know this, so they learn to sing in many languages, as it were.

Overall, says Con Slobodchikoff, an animal behaviorist and emeritus professor at Northern Arizona University, the study adds to the 'mounting evidence that animals have a lot more linguistic and cognitive capabilities than they're usually given credit for.'