Birds that sing to their mates are noisier than airplanes

The white-bellied bird in the Amazon forest has set the record for the world's biggest cry, which can damage human hearing.

The white- bellied bird, a rainforest bird in the remote mountains of the Amazon basin, has the loudest cry recorded in the world, according to research published October 21 in the journal Current Biology. The song calling its partner is noisier than the plane taking off even though they only weigh 250g.

The song of a white bell bird.(Video: Science Alert).

By going deep into the forest, the team was able to record the singing of two birds, the white bell and the piha . Earlier, the screaming piha bird was the record holder for the loudest cry. When singing, the screaming piha reached 116.1 dB, lower than the 124.5 dB of the white bell bird. The researchers also found different ways of singing. The screaming piha bird only performs one song while the white bell bird has two.

The team observes birds singing in a variety of situations, including when the female approaches. The white bell chirers the loudest while the female is nearby. Typically, animals often make the loudest calls to communicate over long distances. When singing half a song, the male bird will turn his body to face potential partners. The female will move away just before her partner is singing, but still within 4 meters.

White bell bird.

According to Professor Jeff Podos, a specialist in vertebrate behavior at the University of Massachusetts, the song seems to startle the female. This result seems to contradict what the male is going to do. No animal on the planet sang so loudly near objects that received sound. The female is more likely to have a balance between the need to listen to different songs and the protection of hearing.

Professor Podos shared the activity of measuring the singing of white bell bird faced a number of obstacles. Mario Cohn-Haft, a co-author of the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia Institute, Brazil, proposed exploring the white-bellied bird after the 2017 field trip. attracted the interest of Podos.

"One of the biggest difficulties in research was finding our way to the top of the mountain where the white bell bird lived. We had to hire a group of local residents to make way through the forest. Another major difficulty was figuring out how to measure it." the volume from the birds singing The request was to measure the distance between us and the bird, because the further away you were, the smaller the sound was, in the end we decided to use a laser rangefinder for golf " , Professor Podos said.

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