When Honeyguides lead to snakes: new insights into a rare behaviour
In rare cases, Greater Honeyguides lead humans to snakes or carcasses - and now we finally know why.
Centuries of stories, one rare behaviour
Across Africa, indigenous honey-hunting cultures have long shared striking tales of a remarkable bird, the Greater Honeyguide. These birds famously lead humans to wild bees’ nests, benefiting from the wax left behind after harvest. But some cultures report that honeyguides sometimes lead people to large animals or snakes instead - a phenomenon attributed in some traditions to punishment for failing to reward the bird. Now, new fieldwork from Mozambique lends rare, quantitative support to these stories, while pointing to a more mundane explanation - memory error.
The new study, led by David Lloyd-Jones and colleagues, recorded hundreds of human-honeyguide interactions in Niassa Special Reserve. In 2018, four of 108 recorded guiding events ended not at bees’ nests, but at a puff adder, a black mamba, a rock python, and a dead galago. In each case, the bird stopped at the animal and emitted the same vocal and flight behaviours it uses when arriving at bees. All four instances involved consistent guiding behaviour - including “indication calls” near the destination - suggesting these were not random detours.
Punishment, warning, or something else?
These findings revitalise a long-standing debate. Some cultures believe honeyguides punish humans who fail to share beeswax by leading them to danger. Others see such events as a kind of altruistic warning. Lloyd-Jones et al. tested five hypotheses for why honeyguides might guide to non-bee animals, including these two, and found little support for either. Guiding to snakes or carcasses did not occur more frequently after unrewarded encounters, and most of the animals involved posed no serious danger to humans.
Nor did honeyguides benefit by mobbing these animals or attracting humans as defence partners. Instead, the data best fit a novel hypothesis, that guiding to non-bees results from a cognitive spatial recall error. Like corvids and chickadees, honeyguides depend on memory to locate food. Mistakenly leading a human to a previously memorable but unrewarding location - such as a dead animal - may be an occasional by-product of an otherwise adaptive spatial system.
Echoes of ecology and evolution
Although the events are rare - about 3.7% of interactions in a single year, and 0% in others - they are consistent enough to have shaped human cultural traditions. Among the Yao honey hunters of northern Mozambique, all 21 hunters informally interviewed affirmed their belief that rewarding honeyguides encourages continued cooperation and protection. The study suggests that these beliefs, even if based on occasional cognitive errors by birds, could help maintain the mutualism over time by increasing human generosity toward honeyguides.
Lead author Lloyd-Jones explains that while the birds likely don't "mean" to guide humans to danger, the effect on human behaviour may be real and beneficial. “A rare spatial memory error may have ripple effects that ultimately benefit honeyguides,” the authors write, “by reinforcing human cultural traditions that reward them for guiding.”
Learning from the rare
This study offers a rare empirical look at one of Africa’s most evocative interspecies interactions. By combining field data, acoustic analysis, and cultural insight, it brings clarity to behaviour long dismissed as myth. It also shows how scientific and Indigenous knowledge can align - while maintaining enough mystery to remind us how much we have yet to learn about the complex minds of birds that guide us through the forest.
5 May 2025
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