the honey-guides 119 



Songs and Calls 



The greater honey-guide has a number of vocal utterances and also 

 a mechanical nonvocal sound manifestation produced by air and 

 feathers. The last is described fully in the account of courtship and 

 mating and need not be repeated here. 



The best laiown of its calls is the chattering note given when 

 guiding. This is used by males and by females, and by fully adult 

 and by immature birds. As far as my own observations go, and the 

 observations of others reported to me personally or in the literature, 

 there is no appreciable difference in the calls' pitch, intensity, or 

 carrying power according to the sex or age of the bird. A remarkably 

 faithful imitation of the guiding chatter may be made by shaking a 

 partly filled pocket-matchbox back and forth lengthwise. The 

 chatter is a repetitive series of somewhat purring, rolling, slightly 

 rasping churrr notes, sometimes giving the impression, in series, of 

 churrra-churra or chwrrrt notes. It has also been \vi'itten cutta-cutta- 

 cutta. Skead (1951, p. 57) notes that there is no "body movement or 

 excitement during the calling, the bird sits quite still, often hunched 

 up," but when first trying to attract the attention of a would-be 

 follower the bird flits about very actively and pauses only momentar- 

 ily to chatter. Some of the accounts in the literature give the im- 

 pression that the bird calls while flying as well as betweeen flights, 

 and I have experienced this myself on one occasion. At Hluhluwe 

 Reserve, Zululand, October 16, 1950, at 9:21 a. m. a honey-guide 

 came to me and my Zulu assistant in answer to the latter's whistling 

 and calling. Then it began to "guide" us to a bees' nest, the total 

 guiding tour involving seven flights from one stopping place to 

 another. The bird was silent during the first two of these flights, 

 but on the other five it was chattering constantly, the volume of the 

 sound increasing each time it lit in a tree. It did not become silent 

 until it reached the vicinity of a bees' nest, when it settled down in a 

 large fig tree and sat quietly. However, in other cases of personal 

 participation in guiding tours, the bird's calling was done between 

 the component flights, even though these intervals of perching were 

 quite brief in many instances. 



The guiding call often commences quite suddenly, i. e., in cases 

 where the bird "seeks out" the human rather than the other way 

 about, it does not begin to call until it is quite close by. On such 

 occasions one usually does not hear it from afar, coming closer and 

 closer. This last situation does, however, occur at times when humans 

 go out to attract the attention of a honey-guide. In the Hluhluwe 

 Reserve, in Zululand, I was out in the bush with a native who was 



