Bird teams up with humans for ultimate prize — honey

For thousands of years, humans have trained animals to help them. Today, pigs locate truffles. Dogs sniff for drugs. Dolphins detect underwater mines.

But working in partnership with an untrained wild animal is another thing altogether. It’s so rare that it’s been documented in only one species: the greater honeyguide.

These petite, orange-beaked birds live across sub-Saharan Africa, and they do what their name implies: They guide people to beehives containing honey, which people have a hard time finding on their own and the birds can’t access without being stung to death. For this service, the birds get something in return — the leftover beeswax and larvae, which they eat with abandon. The birds’ unique skill earned them the fitting scientific name of indicator indicator.

This remarkable human-animal collaboration has been recorded in various spots in Africa where the greater honeyguide lives, and it often involves a honeyguide showing up when it hears people going about their business or whistling. The bird might then hop about and chatter to signal its readiness to lead a honey-hunting expedition. The people then trail the honeyguide, which keeps itself visible by displaying its white tail feathers, until the entire gang arrives at the booty. The people then smoke out the bees, chop open the tree and the hive and harvest rewards for man and bird alike.

But it works a little differently in the Niassa Nature Reserve of northern Mozambique, a Denmark-sized expanse of remote wilderness that is a crucial habitat for lions and elephants. There live Yao tribe members who depend on honey for trade and nourishment — and who have developed their own unique method of communicating with honeyguides.

When they want to find honey, the Yao call the birds with what a new study calls a “loud trill followed by a grunt: ‘brrr-hm.’ ” It’s a sound Yao honey-hunters learn from their fathers and use under no other circumstances, according to the study, published recently in Science. And the honeyguides know exactly what it means, the researchers found.

“The crucial point is that honeyguides love wax, whereas humans love honey,” Claire Spottiswoode, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge and the University of Cape Town, said. “So there’s no conflict of interest over the reward.”