Claire and David travel to Tanzania for fieldwork, en route to Niassa for further field experiments. They drive from David’s hometown of Iringa to Kondoa where they make an exploratory trip, along with Brian Wood, to explore the remaining Sandawe honey-hunting culture. Brian is an anthropologist who has worked extensively with the Hadza people, and this short trip was a fabulous source of stimulating ideas and time spent doing interviews and honey-hunting.
We have published a new study in People and Nature showing that people in northern Mozambique use regionally distinct “dialects” when communicating with honeyguides. Led by Jessica van der Wal, the paper shows that human–honeyguide communication varies across landscapes in ways that mirror regional variation in human languages. Despite these differences in calls, cooperation between people and honeyguides remains successful and important for human livelihoods across the Niassa Special Reserve, suggesting that both species adjust to one another across their shared landscape.
We are pleased to share our new paper on honey-hunting with honeyguides, in western Africa this time. Led by Wiro-Bless Kamboe as part of his MSc project, and co-authored with Claire Spottiswoode and Timothy Khan Aikins, with Jessica van der Wal as senior author, the study documents honey-hunting practices in northern Ghana and explores the involvement of greater honeyguides. We found that while mutualism persists, it occurs at lower levels than those documented in eastern and southern Africa. Honey-hunters in Ghana often visit known bees’ nests without honeyguides’ help, and discarded beeswax continues to supplement the birds’ diet. We found no clear evidence that socio-economic changes, such as increased access to motorised transport, have disrupted this relationship.
Dr David Lloyd-Jones graduated with his PhD from the University of Cape Town, entitled “Cooperation, ecology and behaviour in the honeyguide-human mutualism” – congratulations, David, on this wonderful outcome of many happy years of fieldwork in the Niassa Special Reserve together with our honey-hunter collaborators and friends, supported by the Mariri Environmental Centre.