Pied Babblers | FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology

Since 2003, Prof Amanda Ridley has maintained a long-term study of habituated Southern Pied Babblers Turdoides bicolor, on the Kuruman River Reserve in the southern Kalahari Desert. Together with her collaborators, Amanda’s work explores the behavioural ecology of Pied Babblers, providing unique insight into conflict versus cooperation in group-living societies, vocal communication, behavioural responses to climate extremes, and the relationship between sociality and cognition.

The Pied Babbler Research Project investigates the costs and benefits of cooperation, and the relationship between cooperation, cognition and climate change. Long-term life history data, along with short-term observations and experiments, have helped us understand the causes and consequences of cooperative breeding behaviour, and to determine influences on individual cognition. The study population size varies according to weather conditions, with the population decreasing when breeding seasons are hot and dry, and during very cold winters.

The range of questions that can be asked increases as the duration of the study grows, and we can now assess the factors influencing life-time fitness. The Babbler team have been investigating the impact of heat on cognitive ability. This research theme came about because cognition is vital to an individual’s ability to behaviourally respond to changes in their environment. Postdoctoral fellow Camilla Soravia has found that heat stress impairs some, but not all cognitive abilities in babblers. The decline in associative learning ability during very high temperatures is of concern, because identifying the relationship between a cue and a threat is often how animals recognise competitors and predators. Camilla also found that cognitive ability declines with age in females, but not males – presumably due to the higher costs of reproduction in females. She also found that heat stress experienced during the early developmental period can have lifelong impacts, affecting reproductive success and cognition in adults.

We conducted a number of physiological studies recently, looking at dehydration during incubation, and using thermal imaging to determine the level of heat stress individuals were under. Postdoctoral fellow Dr Shannon Conradie collated a huge dataset on behaviour during different points of the day for Pied Babblers, as well as Southern Yellow-billed Hornbills and Fiscal Shrikes, collected by members of the Pied Babbler and Hot Birds research teams over the last 15 years. Shannon used these behavioural data to better inform existing biophysical models, and used different climate change projections to determine how this would impact these species in the future. Sadly for the pied babblers, she found that under a warming climate, they are the most vulnerable of the three species, with a >50% increase in the number of days that they are a risk of lethal dehydration. This points to limited population viability for Kalahari endemics like pied babblers as climate change continues to impact the area.

Activities in 2024

Camilla Soravia completed her time as a postdoctoral fellow on the project and started a new position at the University of Chester.
Sabrina Engesser completed her final paper on vocal communication in pied babblers. Predator exposure experiments (taxidermied predator presentations) were completed and analysis (led by Dr Soravia) is underway.
Two new field assistants joined the research project. .

Highlights:

Our research on evidence for complex vocal behaviour, headed by Dr Sabrina Engesser, was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. This research builds on previous evidence of call combinations (believed to represent the precursors of language in humans), in pied babblers. To test that the combining of calls needed to occur in a specific way to encode information (similar to what we know as syntax in language), the call combinations pied babblers make were reversed and played back to them, to see if their response differed. This paper is titled ‘Seeds of language-like generativity in bird call combinations’.
Our research was presented at the International Society for Behavioural Ecology (ISBE) conference in Melbourne in 2024 – this is one of the largest behavioural ecology conferences in the world.
Our research that used biophysical models to inform about potential future impacts on pied babblers under a changing climate was published in Ecography. This research was headed by Dr Shannon Conradie and titled ‘Integrating fine-scale behaviour and microclimate data into biophysical models highlights the lethal risk of hyperthermia and dehydration’.
Camilla Soravia presented our pied babbler research at the 30th National Congress of the Italian Ethological Society.
Amanda Ridley and Camilla Soravia co-authored a review that summarizes our current and future research interests, on the importance of accounting for the effects of multiple anthropogenic stressors that may be simultaneously impacting a population. This review was published in Journal of Avian Biology.
Amanda and her (non-Pied babbler project affiliated) colleague published an opinion piece in Nature Climate Change that reflects the lab’s current vocal communication research interests, entitled ‘Climate-induced divergence of song’.

Visit the Hot Bird Research Project page for more details on the collaborative work between the Pied Babbler Project and the Hot Birds Research Project,

Key co-supporters
Australian Research Council.

Research team 2024
Team leaders and Collaborators
A/Prof. Amanda Ridley (FIAO, UCT / UWA)
Dr Camilla Soravia (UWA)
Dr Amanda Bourne (AWC)
A/Prof. Susie Cunningham (FIAO, UCT)
Dr Ben Ashton (UWA/Maquarie)
Dr Alex Thornton (U. Exeter)
Dr Shannon Conradie (FIAO, UCT / Wits)

An adult southern pied babbler displaying vigilance behaviour in response to a potential predator threat. Our current research investigates how air temperature and individual associative learning performance influence antipredator behaviours, including vigilance, alarm calling, and fleeing (Photo: Camilla Soravia).

An adult southern pied babbler interacting with a cognitive task designed to quantify associative learning performance. One of the two coloured lids hides a food reward and the task measures how many trials an individual needs to learn the association between the colour of the lid and the food reward. Our research has shown that individuals require more trials to learn the association when the maximum air temperature during cognitive testing is higher (Photo: Camilla Soravia).

An adult and two juvenile pied babblers. Fledglings have a prolonged period of development, and do not obtain adult plumage until about one year of age, though this varies quite a bit between individuals. Our research has shown that heat stress conditions experienced during development impacts adult cognition and reproductive success (Photo: Amanda Ridley).

A pied babbler displaying heat dissipation behaviour. In Pied Babblers, this typically involves bill gaping and splaying, sometimes simultaneously, like in this picture. Babblers are tested under both conditions (normal and heat dissipating) to determine the impact of heat dissipation behaviour on their daily behaviours and responsiveness to their surrounding environment (Photo: Nicholas Pattinson).

Wanting to study further?

The Study Opportunities page provides details for prospective students including information on the Conservation Biology Masters Course and Scholarships.