My World of Animals: Extreme #11

#mwoaextreme #entry11 #superblyrebird

Well, I think it’s about time I did one of these dumb things in English! I’ll be doing English entries quite sporadically since most of my corresponding audience is Indonesian, and therefore have borderline-crappy English. Plus, I’m way funnier when speaking English so do what you will with that little info. Besides, we have the right animal for the job! The Lyrebird is one of the more underrated Aussie animals and frankly I think it deserves more limelight.

The Lyrebirds (family Menuridae) are basically a bunch of really talented ventriloquists of the animal world – from the two extant species of lyrebirds, the supreme lyrebird is clearly the more over-the-top, with 16 long lace-like feathers on the rears of the male with the two outermost feathers curling to form the outer ‘lyre’. As with most sexual dimorphic characteristics of animals, these feathers, also called filamentaries, develop during their equivalent of puberty, which comes at around the age of 7 for the male lyrebirds. During mating season, males will use these feathers for a courtship dance, videos of which can be easily be found on YouTube.

One more little tidbit: The superb lyrebirs posseses the most intricate vocal chord of any known extant songbird – this basically means that they can imitate lots of different noises. They can imitate the calls of around 20 species of birds and simple man-made noises like car alarms. In 2013, we also found out that the supreme lyrebird can mimic other more complex man-made noises such as laser toy guns and chainsaws.

Pro animalium!