Lyrebirds are one of the oldest living songbirds in the world. Australia’s ancient Gondwanan rainforests have been filled with the songs of lyrebird for between 25 -40 million years. To put that into perspective, we were still connected to Antarctica when the first lyrebird likely began singing.
While Australia has had other species of lyrebirds in the past, today there are just two existing species – superb and Albert’s. Superb lyrebirds occur from around Washpool National Park south to Mount Field, Tasmania (they were introduced to Tasmania in the 20th century). The smaller and far-shier Albert’s lyrebird are super-restricted in distribution, occurring only from around Nightcap Range National Park, north to Springbrook NP in south-eastern Queensland.
Male superb lyrebirds set up large territories along forest ridges and upper slopes of rainforest and moist eucalypt forest. High-value territories are those that overlap with multiple female territories (who use the more productive lower slopes and rainforest gullies). Males advertise and defend their territorial claims through song, and because rival neighbors can be up to a kilometre away, they need territorial voices powerful enough to penetrate the dense forest for at least that far.
I have watched a male lyrebird belting out his incredibly loud territorial calls, only to suddenly pause and cock his heads to listen to the return song of a rival located on the next ridge over. When the distant bloke stops to take breath, ‘my bird’ immediately began calling again. This ‘song-handball’ went on for an hour or so. I was impressed with the strict adherence to the rules. Perhaps it’s a 40-million-year-old gentlemen’s club?
While males are often heard mixing in a bunch of mind-blowing mimicry (see the Mimicry Voice page) with their classic territorial calls, it seems clear that each type of call is targeting a different audience. The insane volume of the territorial call is meant for distant rivals while the quieter mimicry is aimed at luring nearby females to come up the hill and watch his full breeding performance.
Because groups of lyrebirds are spatially isolated from each other by uncrossable corridors of drier forest, cleared farmland or large coastal rivers, territorial calls within a group of local males (called a ‘lek’) are culturally unique to each geographical metapopulation. The degree of regional dialect characteristics is so strong that, while traversing new rainforest areas, I have more than once found myself momentarily baffled by a loud, unfamiliar call in the rainforest only to realise after a while it was just a heavily accented ‘local’ superb lyrebird.
The call recorded here is from a male superb lyrebird in the upper Bellinger Valley.