Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Drongo birds use false alarm calls to trick meerkats into dropping food so they can steal it. Meerkats rely on drongo warning ...

Late last year, I wrote about a bird called the rocket-tailed drongo and, in response to a comment, I noted the following: “Drongos are notorious thieves and mimics. In South Africa, I spent a morning ...

Real-life masters of the art of false alarms don’t keep crying wolf. Shrieking multiple fake danger signals lets a bird keep its scams going. When food gets scarce, African birds called fork-tailed ...

A meerkat alarm call is made by a meerkat when it spotted a predator (martial eagle). This audio file relates to a paper that appeared in 2 May, 2014, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, ...

For starlings and meerkats in the Kalahari Desert, the fork-tailed drongo, a songbird with glossy black feathers and garnet-red eyes, is like the neighborhood dog: a trustworthy pal that's always on ...

Meerkats have come to rely on the call of the drongo bird to alert them when danger is nearby. In return, the bird gets to snatch up the food left behind by the meerkats in their haste to escape. It’s ...