Superb fairywrens more likely to help family members in distress than strangers, like humans

What do superb fairywrens have in common with humans? They are more likely to help a family member in distress than a stranger.

The study, from scientists at Monash University and the Australian National University, tracked the beloved songbirds in the first research to focus on understanding how animals that live in a multi-level society, like humans, decide to help one another when in need.

The study, published in Current Biology, tested this by placing nearby a fake kookaburra, which is a predator of the superb fairywren, and then broadcasting a call of distress which was varied according to social relations.

When a member of a superb fairywren’s family is being attacked, the researchers found it will risk life and limb to distract the predator. The bird will raise an alarm call, or puff up its plumage and scurries around like a mouse in what is known as a “rodent run”.

“It was a remarkable thing to watch,” said Prof Robert Magrath, a study co-author from the ANU. “It’s like the bird changes costume to something very strange.”

But if the superb fairywren being attacked is an acquaintance, the researchers found it will help but not as intensely. If the attacked superb fairywren is a stranger, it will ignore the cries for help altogether.

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“[It] was really quite astonishing how big a variation there was in how much help was provided,” Magrath said.

Ettore Camerlenghi, the lead author of the study and a PhD candidate at Monash University, said that, like humans, superb fairywrens have a core social group.

“We found the wrens, like hunter-gatherers, have three distinct types of relations – those from the same breeding group, familiar individuals from the same community and unfamiliar birds from the wider population,” Camerlenghi said.

The superb fairywren is one of Australia’s most loved birds and was voted the 2021 bird of the year in the Guardian Australia/BirdLife Australia poll. The poll will return later this year.

BirdLife Australia’s Sean Dooley said it was the complexity and quirkiness of superb fairywrens’ social lives, like those revealed in the research, that made the bird a favourite among Australians.

“Everything we learn about the fairywren just makes you love them more,” Dooley said.

“They are socially monogamous, but they are also incredibly sexually promiscuous … Very few of the [superb fairywren] chicks are fathered by the male parent in the pair.

“The lives of the fairywrens rival the biggest hotbed intrigue of a soap opera.”

Superb fairywrens, found in south-eastern Australia, are well known for the ultraviolet blue that the male birds flaunt when it is breeding season. Female superb fairywrens sport the same brown and white plumage year-round.

The birds are one of the most frequently encountered small bush birds in BirdLife Australia’s annual bird count, Dooley said, but the numbers were drastically declining in urban and outer-urban areas.

BirdLife Australia is a partner in a citizen science project that will guide habitat restoration of superb fairywrens in inner Melbourne by tracking where the birds live and forage.