You're walking around in the blue mountains of southeastern Australia, in the shade of a forest filled with tree ferns and the fragrance of eucalyptus leaves.

Suddenly, you hear this sound coming from behind some bushes near your path. If you know your bird sounds for this region, you might at first think that you're hearing

some kind of weird roundtable discussion among several bird species, including a rainbow

lorikeet, a common mina, a pied curawong, a yellow-tailed black cockatoo, and a few others.

But, and maybe you figured this out already, what you heard is actually the song of one bird,

a single individual.

This part of Australia is home to the superb lyre bird.

This large ground-dwelling bird has a long, elegant tail

and an amazing ability to mimic other birds. And it can mimic other sounds in its environment.

There's a famous BBC documentary clip with David Attenborough, where he shows us one of these

lyrebirds mimicking a camera shutter, a car alarm, and a chainsaw. You should be able to find

this clip on YouTube. It's really impressive. Birds are never very far from us, no matter where we are

on earth. Even when we can't see them, we can usually hear them. If we slow down occasionally

and use our ears to survey which birds are singing nearby, we can often be surprised

by the diversity of species and of bird sounds that are all around us.

Hello and welcome. This is the Science of Birds. I'm your host, Ivan Philipson. The Science of Birds podcast is a lighthearted,

guided exploration of bird biology for lifelong learners. Today's episode is all about bird's songs.

This is actually part one of two since there's so much to talk about around this subject.

And a podcast is the perfect medium to explore

bird songs, so I'm pretty jazzed about covering this topic with you. I hope you find it as

fascinating as I do. Okay, dokey, let's dive in, shall we? Birds are noisy.

Compared to most mammals and other animals that we encounter on a daily basis, birds make a lot of racket.

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