This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: University of Massachusetts Amherst's Jeff Podos and his former graduate student João C.T. Menezes have identified two contenders for the title of world's loudest bird: the bare-throated bellbird and the red-legged seriema.
Their findings also help explain why some birds are so much louder than others. This isn't the first time Podos has made such a discovery. In 2019, he discovered that the Amazon's white bellbird had the world's loudest bird call—louder than standing next to a revving chainsaw—a claim later confirmed by Guinness World Records.
But setting world records is only a byproduct of Podos and Menezes' research. The new study, published in Evolution, is the latest in the authors' career-long quest to understand the role evolutionary biology plays in how birds communicate with each other. But searching for record-breaking birds wasn't what Menezes and Podos were after.
Instead, they wanted to know whether physical characteristics of a bird's body can predict how loud its call will be, and how, or whether, loudness is related to a bird's ecological niche and social organization. "Figuring out how loud a bird call is should be pretty easy in the lab," says Menezes, who completed this research as part of graduate work at UMass Amherst. "But until very recently, it has been very challenging to do in the field, and there's very little data to draw on." This is because volume, or amplitude, depends on distance.
A scream that is ear-splitting up close might barely register a few hundred meters away. One method to gauge the amplitude of a bird call is to capture the bird, bring it back to the lab and run controlled experiments there—which is not practical, especially when working internationally and comparing large numbers of birds. "You have to get your boots on the ground," says Podos, who accompanied Menezes in measuring the amplitudes of 123 birds around Amherst, Massachusetts, and across Brazil.
But they also needed the right tools, which weren't available until recently. It wasn't practical for ornithologists to reliably measure amplitude and distance at the same time. That changed when golfers developed accurate laser rangefinders and workplace safety monitors developed high-resolution portable sound meters.
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