Swarms make humming and “tick tick tick” noises — the sound of the ants, and of animals scurrying in panic.
— To better understand Equatorial Guinea’s tropical birds, ornithologists Luke L. Powell and Patricia Rodrigues scan the ground rather than the trees. They are searching for nests of driver ants . These voracious predators will march out of their underground nests and fan out into a meters-wide swarm, flushing out insects and worms from undergrowth. From the trees, birds swoop down to catch the fleeing insects. And where the ant swarms go, the birds follow.
— and of animals scurrying in panic . “Then you hear the sounds of birds chirping at the edge [of the swarm], communicating.” The first step to figuring that out is finding driver ant nests. Since 2020, Rodrigues has spent weeks at a time scrutinizing the ground for ants in a forest near Ciudad de la Paz. When she finds them, she knows to keep her distance. “They’re super-duper aggressive and they have giant mandibles that can pierce your skin,” Rodrigues says. Despite her caution, ant bites “inevitably happen”— sometimes the ants fall out of trees onto her and her colleagues.
For their latest study, Rodrigues, Powell and colleagues placed cameras at the entrances of seven driver ant nests and recorded about 80 hours of footage. “Birds come up to a nest entrance and check it out,” says Powell, leaning his body forward and turning his head left and right, imitating a bird, “and fly into the direction of where the ants are raiding that day.”
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