How An African Bird Forged A Relationship With Humans
The greater honeyguide learned to lead humans to beehives, luring them with the promise of honey so they’d unlock the wax the birds eat.
The following is an excerpt from The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us about How to Live Well with the Rest of Life by Rob Dunn.
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The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us about How to Live Well with the Rest of Life
In sub-Saharan Africa dwells a drab little bird called the greater honeyguide (Indicator indicator), hereafter just the honeyguide. The honeyguide eats insects, such as honey bees, but it also eats wax. It has a hunger for wax and seeks out the nests of honey bees to obtain it. In its search it relies on some mix of learning, vision, and, maybe especially, sniffing. That the honeyguide uses its sense of smell in finding bees and their wax is attested by a crude experiment and by history.
In the 1960s the ornithologist Kenneth Stager conducted an experiment in which he used a beeswax candle to attract honeyguides. Initially, he put the candle in the crotch of a tree, unlit. On a later date, he returned the candle to the tree, but lit it. Stager’s implicit hypothesis was that when the candle was lit, its burning wax would release more of the molecules of the wax into the air. If the honeyguides found wax by nose, then they should be more likely to come to the wax when it was on fire. No honeyguides found the unlit candle. Once the candle was lit, no fewer than half a dozen of them arrived, all within half an hour. We might say that they were ravenous, but ravens crave many kinds of foods. The desires of honeyguides are simpler and yet no less powerful. Wax. Wax. Wax. History has conducted other experiments similar to Stager’s. A Portuguese priest working in Mozambique found that when he lit the candles in his church, honeyguides would quickly find them and start eating the wax. I leave the theological implications of these snuffed candles to others.
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To the honeyguide, the smell of wax seems to be as appealing as the taste of honey is to humans. But honeyguide birds are born with a burden. They cannot readily get wax on their own. They have no way into well-sealed honey bee nests. I was tempted to try to find an analogy to explain this, but they are their own best example.
Honeyguides cope with this burden in two ways. They can follow other nonhuman animals, such as honey badgers, when they attack honey bee nests, and they do. They can also form mutualisms with humans. To initiate a mutualism with a group of humans, the honeyguide flies to human settlements, where it makes a specific call that it uses only when trying to attract humans: it is a loud chattering call, a call that says, “I have found honey. Follow me. Follow me.” This honeyed song that pours from their mouths (to paraphrase Homer’s Odyssey) is accompanied by a whole-body gesture, a specific sort of flying back and forth, as if for emphasis: “I said, follow me.” Then the honeyguide flies in the direction of the nest.
There is a bird in the forests of Costa Rica that calls at dusk, and sometimes it appears to say “Rob.” I never follow, though I’m tempted. Superficially, a bird calling from the forest seems a little too much like the Sirens that called Odysseus, Sirens with the heads of humans and the bodies of birds (only later did Sirens acquire their mermaidy fishlike forms). Odysseus had his men plug their own ears with wax, from bees of course, and then tie him to the mast of his ship so that he would not be tempted. I didn’t require quite so much restraint. Though, unlike the Sirens in the Odyssey, the bird in the Costa Rican forest did not offer to regale me with my successes.
What the honeyguide offers humans is more than what the Sirens had at hand: it offers sweetness. Few can resist sweetness. So much so that in tens of cultures humans respond to the honeyguides and follow them. Possibly, this relationship is extraordinarily ancient and has persisted for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, changing and yet keeping on across culture, geography, and time. This is my suspicion, and so too that of Cambridge honeyguide biologist Claire Spottiswoode. Alternatively, different human populations might have been called by the birds independently. In this latter scenario, many different humans have independently watched this bird signal to them and thought, “Maybe I should follow.” In each case, they have found a way to reply to the bird, “Yes, yes, I am coming. Wait!”
In following this African Siren, humans find honey, dependably. Spottiswoode has shown that in Mozambique, Yao honey hunters are successful in finding bee nests roughly three-quarters of the time when following honeyguides. The Yao and other peoples have learned that these birds will nearly always lead them to honey, and so they have developed ways to talk back to the birds or even to call them in when they are not yet present. The calls that people use for honeyguides in different places are different. But the honeyguides in different places appear to learn these different human calls. In northern Mozambique and southern Tanzania, the honeyguides have learned to respond to a trill, followed by a kind of grunt, produced by the Yao honey hunters: “Brrr . . . hmmm.” In northern Tanzania, they respond to a kind of melodious whistle produced by Hadza honey hunters. Honey-hunting humans are three times as likely to find a bee nest when they call to the honeyguide.
The study of honeyguides by scientists began in earnest with the work of a Kenyan ornithologist, Hussein Isack. Wooed by the honeyguide, Spottiswoode and a small number of other dedicated scholars, including Brian Wood at the University of California at Los Angeles, have built on and added to Isack’s insights. The honeyguide calls to the taste buds of most people; but for these scholars, the more irresistible call is to their curiosity. In study after study, this community of thinkers has gone to great lengths to detail, document, elaborate, and extend what the people in these regions already know: that the honeyguides are good guides, that they respond to human calls, and that details of their flights indicate the distance and direction of a honey bee nest.
When humans follow a honeyguide, it leads them to a bee nest with manyfold greater success than if they search on their own. Once they find a nest, humans use tools to extricate the nest and, sometimes, also to calm it (for example, the Hadza and many other cultures use smoke to “chill” the bees). This might be done by felling a tree, digging a nest out of a log, or other particularities of the “kill.” Kill is often the right word, but not always. As Spottiswoode pointed out to me, some human cultures take care to “minimize the degree to which they enlarge the entrance hole to the bees’ nest (and/or place a rock or branch in the hole to narrow it after harvesting).” Some leave some wax combs untouched, so that the colony might recover (and hence be harvested anew).
Ritual and story often encode and enforce the relationship between honeyguide, human, and honey bees. For example, in some cultures, people offer wax to the honeyguide as if to say “thank you.” These offerings back to the honeyguide or the bees are often embedded within oral traditions. In some places, it is said that if the honeyguide is not rewarded, it will turn on the humans and lead them toward danger instead of toward honey. The honeyguide might take them into the mouth of a lion.
There is a danger in not leaving wax for the honeyguide or even just in not following the honeyguide. The danger is that the honeyguide will disappear, either because its populations have declined or because it has given up on humans. Something like this has been seen in parts of Africa where humans no longer follow the honeyguide, having found other sources of honey or just sugar. In those places, the honeyguides sometimes lead beekeepers to their own hives. More often, they just never appear. The bird persists, but the human-bird mutualism has gone extinct. The birds no longer call because the humans no longer listen. Let me say this again with a little more emphasis: there are cases in which the living world calls to us and in which we decline to pay attention. The honeyguide is a very specific case of this and yet also an allegory for something more general. We didn’t come to ignore the honeyguide because we had plugged our ears with wax, but, more simply, because we had found an easier way to get what nature offered: we replaced an extraordinary relationship with a wild bird with a near endless supply of sugarcane, and with it, vast empires of slavery and brutality, and then corn syrup.
Excerpted from The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us about How to Live Well with the Rest of Life. Copyright © 2025. Available from Basic Books.
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About Rob Dunn
Dr. Rob Dunn is a professor in the department of applied ecology at North Carolina State University and the author of eight books. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.