The lyrebird is the reigning king of karaoke in the animal world. Photo by Alex Maisey.
The lyrebird is the reigning king of karaoke in the animal world, with not even the birds being mimicked always able to tell the difference between the lyrebirds and the real thing, researchers at The Australian National University have discovered. PhD candidate Anastasia Dalziell led the team from the Research School of Biology, part of the ANU College of Medicine, Biology and Environment, in the study comparing lyrebirds' mimicked birdcalls to the real thing. Male lyrebirds imitate about 20 to 25 species of birds during the breeding season. "To test the accuracy of the lyrebird's mimicry, we performed an acoustic analysis comparing the real songs of the grey strike-thrush with the lyrebird's mimicked version. Grey shrike-thrushes sing a complex and beautiful song, but lyrebirds can accurately mimic them all the same," Ms Dalziell said. However, with so many impressions of other birds' songs, lyrebirds have found a way to save space in their musical repertoire. "We found that the lyrebirds were accurately replicating the structure of shrike-thrush songs, but they sang an abridged version containing fewer repeated notes than songs sung by real shrike-thrushes.
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