From the Field Notes of Colonel Aubrey Fitch-Harrington, FRS

Observations Upon the Fauna of Southern Africa — Volume III (In Preparation)

“The Fork-tailed Drongo (Dicrurus adsimilis) has appeared in the author’s field notes throughout this volume under the notation: small black bird, alarm behaviour, no further note required. The author requires further note. The drongo produces the alarm calls of up to forty-five documented species — meerkats, starlings, mongooses, hornbills, babblers, and others — with sufficient accuracy to send the owners of those calls into full alarm response. When the animals flee from a false alarm, the drongo takes what they have left behind. It also produces genuine alarm calls when actual predators are present. The author has been reading the alarm calls of other animals as reliable threat indicators throughout this volume. Some of them were the drongo. The author does not know which ones, and the drongo has not indicated that this information is available.”

The drongo was in the acacia above the foraging group when the Colonel arrived.

He had been watching the ground squirrels for twenty minutes — the specific industrious quality of small mammals at work, the constant movement and checking, the food items gathered and taken and gathered again. Normal morning operations. The air smelled of dry grass and the particular warm-dust quality of the Kalahari when the sun has been on it for an hour. He had his notebook.

He noted the drongo as a small black bird. He had been noting it as a small black bird throughout the volume. He had been watching the ground squirrels.

Then the ground squirrels fled.

The alarm call came from the acacia. Not a general bird alarm — the specific churring call that the squirrels used themselves, produced from the throat of the drongo with a precision the Colonel would not have credited if he had not been watching the drongo’s bill at the moment the sound came out of it. The squirrels went underground. The drongo dropped from the acacia, walked to where the nearest squirrel had been foraging, took the grub the squirrel had been in the process of extracting, and returned to the acacia.

The Colonel’s pencil stopped.

He watched the drongo eat the grub.

He wrote: Drongo: produced squirrel alarm call. Squirrels fled. Drongo took foraging item. False alarm. Source: drongo. Purpose: theft. Reviewing previous alarm call notations.

He reviewed them.

There were seventeen entries across the volume reading: alarm calls, genuine threat indicators confirmed. He had been using other species’ alarm responses as early warning data — part of the ambient intelligence of the bush, the distributed awareness that meant a meerkat diving for cover was a reliable indicator of something the Colonel should be watching for.

Seventeen entries.

He read the research literature that evening. Forty-five species’ calls documented and catalogued. The mechanism: the drongo produces a false alarm for the species currently in possession of a food item, waits for the alarm response to create an opportunity, and takes the item. The literature also noted that the drongo gave genuine alarms. The ratio of false to genuine varied by individual, by season, by the presence of actual predators.

Which seventeen of his entries had been drongo?

He did not know.