Listening Earth Blog

Birds don’t just make sounds by singing, they use mechanical and ‘body sounds’ to communicate too.

‘Bill-clicking’ is a widespread behaviour, and is sometimes combined with normal vocalising, as with the flock calls of White-winged Choughs, where a bill-click subtlely precedes a mournful descending whistle (listen for it on track 11 of our ‘A Morning in the Australian Bush’ album).

The distinctive slapping of wings in flight by Crested Pigeons or the haunting whistle of wind through the feathers of Hornbills are other examples of non-vocal sound generation.

I’ve even heard a female White-winged Triller Lalage sueurii distinctly ‘coughing’, or more accurately using what sounded like a very throaty exhalation to create a soft ‘hissing’ sound.

Here is a recording of it.

(You may have to turn the sound up – it is a very soft sound, almost lost in the ambience of the landscape. You can hear it as two ‘hisses’, the first just after the prominent song, and the second softer about 3 seconds later.)

However recent research indicates that the Club-winged Manakin Machaeropterus deliciosus is in a league of its own. These small birds live in the mountain rainforests of Ecuador and Columbia in south America. In a process similar to how crickets and cicadas call, the male vibrates its short wing feathers to create a brief tone around 1500Hz. Unlike some of the sounds I’ve mentioned earlier, the Manakin’s sound is a fully-realised ‘birdsong’, used by the male to attract the female in the species’ communal breeding display.

Other closely-related Manakin species also create mechanical songs, but the Club-wing is the most ‘musically’ articulate. It’s ability is not only an extraordinary evolutionary development, but one of the clearest examples of how a bird can use its body rather than its voice to ’sing’. Click here for a short National Geographic video showing how they do it.

See also: Wikipedia article and New Scientist article describing recent research.