It was the 1930s and a flute-playing farmer from Dorrigo, New South Wales, had a special pet lyrebird. Lyrebirds are ground-dwelling Australian birds famous for their extraordinary ability to mimic almost any sound they hear. Some of the songs the flutist played were popular tunes of the day, like "The Keel Row" and "Mosquito's Dance.”. After a few years, the farmer released his pet bird into the adjacent forest of New England National Park, and he never saw the bird again. Fast-forward 30 years and park ranger Neville Fenton recorded a singing lyrebird. Listening to the bird’s music, Fenton thought he was listening to a performing flutist. Curious, he sent a recording to ornithologist Norman Robinson, who was able to analyze it. He filtered the tunes to separate the lyrebird’s song and discovered that the lyrebird can carry two different tunes at the same time. Once he isolated the tunes, Robinson was able to identify the lyrebird’s music. He was singing his own version of "The Keel Row" and "Mosquito's Dance.” It turns out that the farmer’s lyrebird has passed the songs down, and they continued being passed from generation to generation. It’s now decades since a lyrebird learned these fragments, and today the flute song has been heard over 60 miles from the original source. A human tune is spreading through the lyrebird world.
