The lyrebird can mimic chainsaws, camera shutters and the calls of other birds

The superb lyrebird of southeastern Australia has built a reputation as one of the animal kingdom’s most versatile sound artists, capable of reproducing everything from the calls of a dozen other bird species to the mechanical whine of a chainsaw and the click and whir of a camera shutter. That range comes from an unusually complex vocal organ and a habit of picking up whatever sounds dominate its forest home. The mimicry is not just a novelty act; it plays a direct role in how lyrebirds compete for mates and defend their territory.

A Syrinx Built for Extraordinary Vocal Range

Birds produce sound with an organ called the syrinx, and most species get by with three pairs of syringeal muscles controlling it. The superb lyrebird has as many as seven pairs, giving it far finer control over pitch, tone and rhythm than the typical songbird possesses. That extra musculature is generally credited with the species’ ability to reproduce sounds as different as a fellow bird’s call and the buzz of a mechanical device with convincing accuracy.

Chainsaws and Camera Shutters Alongside Native Bird Calls

A widely viewed segment from David Attenborough’s The Life of Birds shows a male lyrebird working through a routine of car alarm sounds, chainsaw noise and multiple camera shutter clicks, sounds it most likely picked up from photographers and forestry workers active near its territory. The superb lyrebird featured in that footage included captive birds, a detail examined in a closer look at how the famous chainsaw recordings were made, while separate recordings have documented wild individuals mimicking construction equipment and even an electronic shooting game, a version of which was added to Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive registry in 2013. Alongside those artificial sounds, an estimated 70 to 80 percent of a male’s vocalizations consist of imitations of other bird species, with the remainder made up of the lyrebird’s own native song.

Passing Down Sounds Through Other Lyrebirds

Young lyrebirds generally do not learn their mimicked repertoire directly from the species being imitated; instead, they pick up most of it by listening to older lyrebirds already performing those sounds. That pattern has been documented in a population in Victoria’s Sherbrooke Forest, where lyrebirds continued mimicking the call of a bird species that had not actually been recorded in the area for more than a decade, evidence that the sound had been passed down through generations of lyrebirds rather than learned fresh from the source. Building a full repertoire takes years rather than months: male superb lyrebirds do not reach maturity until roughly seven to nine years of age, and their tail plumage develops in stages across that same stretch of time, suggesting the vocal and visual sides of the display mature on a similar timeline.

Accurate Enough to Fool the Original Singer

The precision of the mimicry is not just impressive to human ears. In one study, researchers found that shrike-thrushes responded no differently to a lyrebird’s imitation of their call than they did to a recording of an actual shrike-thrush, meaning the mimicry cleared a bar set by the species being copied rather than by human listeners. Other work has documented lyrebirds convincingly reproducing the alarm calls of multiple bird species in sequence, creating the acoustic impression of a mixed flock mobbing a predator.

A Trait Females Use to Judge Potential Mates

Male superb lyrebirds perform their mimicry most intensively during elaborate courtship displays, fanning an ornate tail over their bodies while cycling through their vocal repertoire on mounds of bare dirt built specifically for the purpose. A single male’s territory can overlap with as many as six female territories, and because the species is polygynous, he may mate with several of the females who visit before settling their choice. Females visit multiple males before choosing a mate, and studies indicate they favor males whose mimicry is both more accurate and more varied, suggesting the skill functions as an honest signal of a male’s quality. Female lyrebirds also mimic, though less research has focused on their vocalizations, and evidence suggests females use the skill partly to defend nests from predators rather than purely to attract mates.

Reshaping the Forest Floor Between Performances

Away from its vocal displays, the superb lyrebird spends much of its time scratching through leaf litter in search of earthworms, insects and fungi, and that foraging has an outsized effect on its habitat. A single lyrebird can turn over and bury an estimated 200 tonnes of soil and leaf litter per hectare in a year, more disturbance than almost any other animal produces, which speeds the breakdown of plant matter and reduces the leaf litter available to fuel forest fires. That combination of ground-level engineering and airborne mimicry has led some researchers to describe the species as an ecosystem engineer in its own right, a bird whose influence on its forest home extends well beyond the sounds it borrows from everything around it, including the chainsaws and cameras of the people who occasionally wander into its territory.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

More from Morning Overview