News Archive

By Sally-Ann Jones

If you think only humans are capable of despicable behaviour, you're in for an unpleasant surprise. A new UWA researcher has discovered that birds are experts when it comes to being bad.

Birds kidnap the offspring of rival groups and young birds blackmail their parents into feeding them by deliberately putting themselves in danger, according to bird expert Associate Professor Amanda Ridley, a Future Fellow in the Centre for Evolutionary Biology. And these are only some of the cut-throat tactics birds use to ensure survival. Others include infanticide, eviction and divorce.

In world-first research, A/Professor Ridley spent a year camped out in the Kuruman River Reserve in the southern Kalahari Desert in order to establish a fully ringed bird population that could be studied long-term.

She lived deliberately quietly so that groups of pied babblers would accept her as part of their environment - and behave as if they were not being watched. Since then, she and her students have spent several months each year in the Kalahari conducting research.

The 70 to 95g birds became so accustomed to her that they even willingly hopped on a scale every day to be weighed.

"Pied babblers live in groups and cooperatively defend a territory year-round," A/Professor Ridley said. "I study 21 different groups which range from three to 16 adults. Each group has one dominant male and female and these are the ones who breed. All the other adults help raise the young produced by the dominant pair."

And bringing up babies in the desert is a full-time job. It involves feeding, sheltering from inclement weather, guarding and defending, and even scaring predators away by ganging up on them.

A/Professor Ridley discovered that the babblers have specific calls to tell the young they are about to be fed - and even different cries according to whether there's a hungry eagle or a mongoose nearby. The birds also teach their young to leave the nest by using the food call to encourage them.

Her intensive research - including a stint in the Middle East to observe Arabian babblers before her Kalahari project - helped to answer the question of why some animals live cooperatively despite great personal cost (including giving up their own chance to breed).

In the case of the babblers, the structure of the group, with a single dominant pair, means most individual adults never have the chance to be parents.

Now at UWA, A/Professor Ridley is continuing her research into both the pied and Arabian babblers and is setting up projects to look at our own Western magpie and Pilbara seabirds that may be impacted by the mining industry.

Like the babblers, magpies are passerine (or perching) birds and also live in groups. Magpies are bigger, at up to 350g, and are known to live for around 20 years.

A New Zealander who did her undergraduate study at NZ's Lincoln University, A/Professor Ridley won a scholarship to Cambridge University, where she did her PhD under the supervision of Professor Tim Clutton-Brock, whose world-famous research forms the basis of televisions' Meerkat Manor documentaries .

For more information about A/Professor Ridley's research, visit

www.babbler-research.com