There are many different styles of flirting: Some let their body do the talking, while others lay on the compliments.
The white bellbird shouts emphatically in a potential partner’s face.
Researchers in the US and Brazil have recorded the loudest bird calls ever documented, made by dove-sized male white bellbirds as part of their mating rituals in the northern Amazon.
Now recognized as the loudest in the world, bellbird calls have a sound pressure about three times that of screaming pihas—another Amazon species recently demoted to second-loudest bird singer documented.
Bellbirds’ songs are so deafening, according to biologist Jeff Podos, that they reach decibel levels equal to the loudest human instruments.
They even dwarf the calls of much larger howler monkeys and bison, which are well studied and “quite loud.”
Podos, a bioacoustic expert at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, worked with Mario Cohn-Haft, of the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia in Brazil.
The pair measured pressure using high-quality sound recorders, plus special sound-level meters and high-speed video to slow action enough for study.
Their results were published in the latest edition of the journal Current Biology.
“We were lucky enough to see females join males on their display perches,” Podos said in a statement. “In these cases, we saw that the males sing only their loudest songs.
“Not only that, they swivel dramatically during these songs, so as to blast the song’s final note directly at the females,” he continued. “We would love to know why females willingly stay so close to males as they sing so loudly.”
Decades of societal pressure, probably.
“Maybe they are trying to assess males up close, though at the risk of some damage to their hearing systems,” Podos added.
Researchers also tried identifying adaptations such as breathing musculature, head and beak size, and throat shape—and how these may influence their unusual aptitude for long-distance song transmission.
“We don’t know how small animals manage to get so loud,” Podos said. “We are truly at the early stages of understanding this biodiversity.”
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