African Honeyguides

Research on a remarkable
human-animal relationship

Honeyguide fieldwork in South Africa

Dec 19, 2020

Chima Nwaogu and Jessica van der Wal with greater honeyguides

Claire and Jessica, together with colleagues Dr Chima Nwaogu and Dr Gabriel Jamie, carried out pilot fieldwork at Honeywood Farm alongside Grootvadersbosch Forest in the southern Cape, South Africa. We were delighted to catch several greater and lesser honeyguides and look forward to returning for further fieldwork. Thank you to John and Miranda Moodie for their warm welcome to work on their beautiful farm. It was thrilling to see so many honeyguides so close to our home base at the University of Cape Town (and to be doing fieldwork again)!

Here Chima holds one of the young greater honeyguides we caught, in their distinctive bright yellow immature plumage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

News

Tragic attacks in the Niassa Special Reserve, Mozambique

On 29 April 2025, armed insurgents attacked the Mariri Environmental Centre in Mozambique’s Niassa Special Reserve, resulting in the tragic loss of two anti-poaching scouts, Domingos Daude and Fernando Paolo Wirsone (please see statement from the Niassa Carnivore Project). This followed a prior tragic attack at Kambako Safari camp on 19 April. Mariri and the nearby village of Mbamba are at the heart of our work on human-honeyguide cooperation, made possible by the knowledge and partnership of the Mbamba honey-hunting community. We grieve alongside the people of Mariri, Mbamba, and the wider Niassa community, and stand in solidarity with the enduring spirit of conservation and unity.

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New paper on honeyguides guiding to snakes (and a mammal) rather than to bees

In a new study from the Honeyguide Research Project, we are excited to present evidence that honeyguides occasionally guide humans to non-bee animals. Our research – which builds on centuries of reports by a wide variety of human cultures across Africa – shows how the behaviour of honeyguides when guiding humans to wild bees’ nests, is spatially and acoustically similar to when honeyguides guide humans to other kinds of animal. In Niassa Special Reserve, where this research was conducted, we find this to be a rare behaviour (occurring on around 1% of honey-hunting interactions). We suggest that the most likely explanation for such behaviour is not as punishment for not previously rewarding the birds with beeswax, nor as a form of altruistic warning behaviour, but rather, due to cognitive mistakes in the birds’ spatial recall.

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Lailat and Jessica on fieldwork at Niassa

Lailat Guta and Jessica van der Wal returned to the Niassa Special Reserve, to visit our long-term collaborators in the Mbamba honey-hunting community and at Mariri Environmental Centre. As part of Lailat’s MSc research on the relationship between honey-hunting and the broader ecosystem, Lailat and Jessica are conducting interviews with honey-hunters and other knowledgeable individuals to document the economic and cultural values of trees and crops, and their dependence on bees.

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