16 Superb Lyrebirds
About this episode
A Superb Lyrebird can change the forest without most of us ever seeing it happen. Ecologist Dr Alex Maisey shares the secret world of lyrebirds, from mimicry to the way they shape ecosystems.
Episode illustration: Male Superb Lyrebird
Dr Alex Maisey is a postdoctoral researcher in ecology at La Trobe University. He started his volunteering life as a child with the Sherbrooke Lyrebird Study Group, a group he now leads as an adult. Alex has a long commitment to local forest restoration and conservation. His PhD research topic was the ecosystem engineering role of the iconic Superb Lyrebird in Victoria’s central highlands. He has also undertaken research about the impact of Australia's Black Summer on lyrebirds and the value of 'natural capital' (e.g. soil, water, animals, plants and fungi) on farms across Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales.
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Kirsty: ‘Country’ refers to an area of land, sea and sky that is associated with a distinct group of people. This episode was recorded on the countries of the Bunurong Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri peoples. I would like to pay my respect to elders past and present and recognise that they are the keepers of the history, traditions, knowledge and cultures of Country.
Kirsty: Welcome to Weekend Birder. I'm Kirsty Costa. In this episode, you are going to meet Alex Maisey. Alex is a scientist who specializes in Superb Lyrebirds, and I'm really excited to hear more about this fascinating Australian bird. Here is how Alex grew his interest in birdwatching.
Alex: I'd really draw it back to watching David Attenborough documentaries and just getting really excited about all these wild animals that were doing these incredible things around the world. And I always loved the idea of tracking an animal through the bush and learning about what it was doing in its life. And I think when I was about three years old, I was lucky enough to have my parents move next to the forest. And this opened up a whole world for me where I was able to jump over the fence and walk into the bush and hear all these incredible sounds and look for these incredible birds. And that's where I really started to become familiar with some of the birds, like the lyrebird that lived in my area. So it was a very organic way to this. Start learning about birds, very informal. And I guess when I was very young, maybe five or six, I started to learn some of the more common birds. And I love chickens - I always had chickens. And then I liked the cockatoos and the rosellas. And then of course, I got a bit more interested in identifying some of those harder birds that I saw flying around, but they were a bit more than kookaburras or ravens. And I started to try to learn the little ones like the thornbills or some of the thrushes. So that was really how I got involved in birding.
Kirsty: Today we are journeying into the depths of Sherbrooke Forest, located in the Dandenong Ranges National Park, just east of Melbourne. It was in this forest that Alex first saw a lyrebird.
Alex: I can remember the first time I saw a lyrebird. I was probably again about five or six years old and walking with my parents in the Sherbrooke Forest. And I can remember this bird with this beautiful long tail just race alongside the track. And I remember thinking, "Oh, that's a lyrebird!". But this bird was so quick and I was so short, I guess I couldn't see over the ferns. I was so small and I remember having trouble seeing the whole bird. But I can just remember this tail disappearing through the bushes. And that was my first experience. I remember I know the exact spot it was. I'll never forget it. Just down in Brendan's Corner, off Newman Track, there was this lyrebird and it took a number of years before I actually got to know the birds a bit better. And I actually found out that this bird was likely one of the favourite birds in Sherbrooke - Mr Graham. This bird back in the day was one of only a few lyrebirds that was in that area - that's likely who it was. So quite a special moment. I actually developed quite a fondness for that bird over about 15 years. It was a long time that that lyrebird was in the same spot. I can clearly remember that first sighting. So we called this bird, Mr. Graham, and then he was he was known as 'Mr. G' affectionately by everyone that came to see him. And he was a star lyrebird. He was in so many films and radio interviews and he was in documentaries. It was it was quite an amazing bird. People tried to interact with him like international musicians came and played clarinet to Mr. G and tried to sort of interact with this bird. He had a real following around the world actually. He was on the television in Japan. He was recorded by so many people. So he was a very special bird, that first lyrebird bird I saw.
Kirsty: There are two species of lyrebird found in Australia - Albert's Lyrebird and the Superb Lyrebird. Albert's Lyrebird is found in a small region of Queensland and far north east New South Wales. In this episode we're going to focus on the Superb Lyrebird. This type of lyrebird is found in the south eastern Australian mainland and also in southern Tasmania.
Alex: The Superb Lyrebird is a chicken-sized bird in its body. It's not a huge bird but quite brown on the body with a grey head. They have this beautiful long tail, especially the males. They're actually called lyrebirds because of the lyrebird tail and the tail feathers. They look like a lyre, the musical instrument. When I was young, I always thought they were called 'liar birds' because they fibbed about who they were with all their mimicry. But it's not that at all. It's the shape of their outer tail feathers that make this lyre-type shape. The males take about seven years to grow this full tail. So it's a very long process. They actually start looking like the females. So the females are a little drab compared to the males. They have a shorter brown tail. They have the same number of feathers in their tail, 16 feathers in the tail, but they have to hide in the undergrowth. So they're not quite as showy. They do use their tail for display to other females, but not in the same way that the males do. They're quite a unique bird, mostly made famous for their ability to sing. And the mimicry is what's really put the lyrebird on the world stage because they can reproduce any sound that they really put their mind to. And of course, famously in David Attenborough's documentary 'Life of Birds', the lyrebird was making all of these human origins sounds like camera clicks and drills and screeching car tires. But that's actually very rare in the wild when you walk in a wet forest. In a tall forest with big gum trees and lots of tree ferns, you're actually likely to hear the lyrebirds in winter. That's where they have their habitat. The wetter forests along the east coast of the Great Dividing Range, along on along our east coast. So it's quite a wide range from just into Queensland, all the way down to Fish Creek in Victoria. Lyrebirds really like the wet of forests, particularly those tall, wet eucalypt forests that we have around the outskirts of Melbourne and the Dandenong Ranges and Kinglake National Park, where you get the big mountain ash trees and lots of tree ferns. This sort of habitat type provides a really good place for lyrebirds to find their food because there's lots of decomposition. It's a moist environment with lots of composting leaf litter and that's where their food leaves, so they eat all of the little invertebrates. So the worms and the little amphipods or crustaceans that live in the leaf litter, they like a moist and damp environment where they can eat that litter. So lyrebirds chasing them will scratch in those those wet forests. And they typically like a nice canopy of middle storey trees too - things like Hazel and Illyria or the Blanket Leaf tree as well. These are trees that protect them from things like goshawks that might attack the lyrebirds when they're foraging for their food. That's the particularly important sort of habitat features that lyrebirds look for and they love their gullies too.
Kirsty: A post-doctoral researcher is a person who is professionally conducting research after the completion of their PhD. Alex is a postdoctoral researcher in ecology at La Trobe University. During his PhD, he investigated the role that Superb Lyrebirds play as engineers of the ecosystems that they live in.
Alex: When they feed, they dig the soil over with their big strong claws and they kick it down hills. So they're pretty clever to use gravity. They don't push it uphill when they scratch. They turn over about 155 tonnes per hectare in a year, so a huge amount. It's actually more than any other documented ecosystem engineer we call them. So these are animals that change the physical environment in ways that affect other animals and plants. It's more than any other animal per unit area. So it's quite an extraordinary force and very important for the health of the forest to live.
Kirsty: Birds have fascinated people and sparked their curiosity because of their famous ability to mimic the sounds of their environment. Alex is here to tell us why they do this.
Alex: The reason lyrebirds mimic is mostly due to sexual selection, particularly the males. So the males are out there displaying and producing this coordinated dance with their song. And it's really hard to produce song and to mimic like that. So if you're a lyrebird that has lots of time to practise mimicry and to get really good at that kookaburra and to be really convincing, a female lyrebird can come along and have a look and say, "Well, you must be a big, strong male with really good genes. And maybe you want to be the father of my chicks". And that's really what's driving the sexual dimorphism - where the males look very different in their tail to the females. It's all about the female mate choice. So that's why one reason why they mimic, but females mimic for a whole range of other reasons too. So that's some new research that's coming out, which is showing that females actually mimic in a functional way too. They're actually using their calls and their talents of mimicry in ways that help them to do things like defend their nests and their chicks. It's quite a fascinating thing that they can do. The thing you need to listen out for when you hear what you think might be a lyrebird, is that a chain of all these different bird calls coming from the one spot and they're also very loud. So the lyrebirds mimic calls very accurately but they do it at a very high volume and they actually truncate them, which means they shorten them. You might hear a kookaburra that's quite short for a real kookaburra call, or a Grey Shrikethrush, where they actually drop entirely a few notes from the call. Even though they have every note represented, they won't do quite as many as the real thing. So it's like they have to show the females, "I'm really accurate but I'm also on the clock here. I'm being assessed really quickly so I have to get out all my calls before you lose interest and walk away to the next male and check out his call". The Wurundjeri "buln buln" call that you might hear in the lyrebird population is actually a dance call. So that's a lyrebird specific call. No other bird in the forest does that that call. It's often mistaken for human origin. Sounds so I've heard people say, "Oh, a lyrebird was doing a ramp up and it was doing this 'choo choo', or it was it was making this funny sound that sounded like a machine because it is quite unusual and it's unlike any other bird in the forest". But the lyrebirds are actually making this call in time with these rhythmic dance moves. They've got to coordinate like we would coordinate a dance to a particular music, a lyrebird has to coordinate its fancy footwork to the 'buln buln' rhythm, which is quite fantastic. When you watch it, it's a really coordinated song and dance. I'm sure the Wurundjeri would have drawn inspiration from the dance of the lyrebird.
Kirsty: The Sherbrooke Lyrebird Study Group was formed in 1958 to protect and observe the Superb Lyrebirds living in the Dandenong Ranges. Alex joined the group when he was 11 years old. He'd go into the forest on weekends with members of the group. He then convinced his parents that they should let him be home schooled so he could spend 3 to 4 hours of each day in the forest learning from different people. His commitment to the Lyrebird Study Group has led him to becoming the group leader as an adult.
Alex: The Sherbrooke Lyrebird Group started way back in 1958. It's actually the longest running volunteer organization with Parks Victoria, so it's quite a historically important group. And the group actually was founded by some ornithologists or some bird experts that were concerned about pine trees being planted through the Dandenong Ranges, predominantly by schools as fundraisers. So they were planting pine trees that were to be cut down for timber and they got together and started lobbying the local shire and the managers of the national park because it wasn't a national park back then and they said, "You know, we really need to conserve the habitat of lyrebirds here". Lyrebirds don't like living in pine plantations and slowly they actually had some traction and the pine plantations stopped and were eventually all removed. So the last one was removed a little bit before my time with the Lyrebird Group. So it would have been a bit before the turn of the century, I think (so fairly recently in the scheme of the forest). And then that led on to other things. So the group had formed because of the pine plantations and they were interested in lyrebirds. So they were also concerned about the population size and started monitoring the birds. Then in through the 1960s and 1970s the focus shifted away from pine plantations and more onto cats and foxes, which were eating the lyrebirds. People were quite concerned that we were going to lose lyrebirds in the Dandenongs due to all of these introduced or feral foxes that were hunting the chicks when they were on the ground. And the Group continued with a range of different programs. The annual Dawn Survey is a big dawn count that's done every June and July in the middle of winter. At 6am in the cold where up to 50 or 60 people come out to count the lyrebirds, and that's been going since the 1970s. So quite some time. And that's basically going out with a compass and torch listening for the first calls of the lyrebirds because they actually roost high up in the mountain ash trees and sing before they get going on their day. It's a really good survey method and then you can count the males. So we've been studying all sorts of aspects of lyrebird ecology with with lots of other people too. Dancers or musicians or artists that come out and meet up with members of the Lyrebird Group and go in and meet the lyrebird. So it's quite varied as to what the group does now.
Kirsty: Over the years, the Sherbrooke Lyrebird Study Group has built an important database monitoring live bird numbers, learning about the birds ecology and understanding the challenges that it faces in its environment.
Alex: The biggest impact, I think, that we've had has been our Dawn Surveys where we've had so many people in the community come out and put their time every year into counting the males. From that we can get a rough indication of of what the population is doing over time. That's really one of the best monitoring tools that Parks Victoria use to both check on the effectiveness of their fox control programs and their deer control programs when they're active. That's really something that's done for free for the agencies that they can then take to them and managers and say, "Well, look, we're doing this management and it's actually working here". So it's a really powerful tool and it's also educating the community. It's giving the community an opportunity to get out into the forest predawn, watch the forest, wake up and learn a whole lot about lyrebirds and other animals and plants in the forest at the same time. So a really, really dual benefit there.
Kirsty: Alex's favorite tool for birdwatching in the Mountain Ash forest of the Dandenong Ranges is his pair of binoculars.
Alex: To see a bird at the top of a Mountain Ash trees is a real challenge and there's always a really contrasty sort of lighting condition when you're trying to look up the top of the tree and identify that Crested Shrike-tit or Grey Shrikethrush. It's a real challenge when you're in these tall forests, if you don't have binoculars. And also they're dark, too. So when I'm in in the forest looking for lyrebirds, if there's a banded lyrebird, I might want to see who that lyrebird is and where the light's really dull. You won't see the colors unless you've got the binoculars. So the binoculars are really a must - I have a pair of Nikon Monarchs. When you're when you're hooked on birding, they're a really good sort of model to go for because they're pretty foolproof. So for me, they've got to be well sealed because it's always raining, particularly this year in in the Dandenong Ranges. When I'm walking up in in the forest, I'm always getting wet. They need to be filled with gas so that they don't fog up so you want the anti-fog binoculars too.
Alex: I think my main piece of advice for beginners would be not to be overwhelmed by the diversity because we do have so many species of birds. When you start getting into the LBJs or the Little Brown Jobs where you're trying to tell apart a Striated Thornvbill from a Brown Thornbill from a Brown Gerygone... And they're all in the same little mixed flock. It can be a real challenge, but don't be daunted, stick at it. And once you start to be able to recognize the differences, listen to the calls, listen to the differences in those calls between species. And once you start to pick them apart by ear and then by eye, you'll find that it's actually a really fun challenge. When you get a big mixed flock, you might have six or eight species moving through the forest in a loose group and you can identify maybe four or five of them by their sound alone. That's a really rewarding experience. Don't be daunted by the diversity because I think that's one of the biggest challenges is just to go, "Wow, there's so many species! How can I learn every one?". "Bit by bit," is the answer.
Kirsty: You can learn more about using binoculars and how to identify little brown birds in previous episodes of this podcast. I don't know about you, but I'm super impressed by Alex's passion, commitment and knowledge about Superb Lyrebirds and birds more generally. In the aftermath of Australia's Black Summer, Alex undertook a study funded by BirdLife Australia and WWF-Australia to understand the impacts of the fires on the lyre bird in south eastern Australia. He is currently working on a large scale project that is measuring how the natural assets of landscapes located on farms across Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales provide essential services such as soil, water, animals and plants. I've popped links in this episode's notes and on the Weekend Birder website if you would like to read more about Alex's research or follow the Sherbrooke Lyrebird Study Group on social media.
