Among the most fantastic forms of animal behavior is that of the honey guides, African birds distantly related to the American woodpeckers. They “guide” men, baboons and ratels to the nests of wild honeybees—supposedly so that these nests will be broken open.
Throughout the three centuries since the unusual behavior of the bird was first reported by a Portuguese missionary it has been the subject of many fantastic accounts, some of which attribute a far higher degree of intelligence to the birds than they possibly could possess.
A long-continued study of this behavior has been made by Dr. Herbert Friedmann, Smithsonian curator of birds. Dr. Friedmann himself has observed at least 23 instances of the habit and has collected much other well authenticated data from African associates. He describes the behavior from his own observations:
“When the bird is ready to begin guiding it comes to a person and starts a repetitive series of churring notes, or it stays where it is and begins calling these notes and waits for the human to approach it more closely. These churring notes are very similar to the sound made by shaking a partly full, small matchbox rapidly sidewise. If the bird comes to the person it flies 15 or 20 feet from him, calling constantly and fanning its tail.
“It usually perches on a fairly conspicuous branch, churring rapidly, fanning its tail, and ruffing its wings so that at times its yellow shoulder bands are visible.
“As the person comes to within 15 to 50 feet the bird flies off with a conspicuous initial downward dip, and then goes off to another tree, not necessarily in sight of the follower, in fact more often out of sight than not. Then it waits there, churring loudly until the follower again nears it, when the action is repeated. This goes on until the vicinity of the bees’ nest is reached. It waits there for the follower to open the hive and usually until the person has departed with his loot of honeycomb, when it comes down to the plundered bee’s nest and begins to feed on the bits of comb left strewn about. The time during which the bird may wait quietly may vary from a few minutes to well over an hour and a half.”
African natives regard the bird as an almost infallible guide to honey. They try to attract it by grunting like a ratel or chopping on trees to imitate the sound of opening a nest. The habit is apparently instinctive; it presumably originated before human beings appeared, perhaps starting with the ratel or some of its honey-eating ancestors.
Curiously enough, the honey bird does not seem interested in the honey, per se, or in the grubs of bees found in the nests. It has an insatiable appetite for the wax, which it will take wherever it can be found. The first account of the bird was of an individual which fed on the wax candles of a church. It appears to have a peculiar ability to digest wax presumably to extract the nutritive elements contained.
The Fantastic Sea Horse
A fish with the head of a Lilliputian horse, the tail of a monkey, the shell of a beetle and the pouch of a kangaroo...a creature that reverses the ordinary course of nature in that “child bearing” is exclusively a function of the male....Perhaps in no other animal have been packed so many anomalies as in the little hippocampus, popularly known as the “sea horse”.