Scientific name: Indicator indicator
The greater honeyguide is a resident breeder in sub-Saharan Africa. It is found in a variety of habitats that have trees, especially dry open woodland, but not in the West African jungle.The greater honeyguide is about 20 cm long and weighs about 50 g. Like all African honeyguides, it has bold white patches on the sides of the tail. The male has dark grey-brown upperparts and white underparts, with a black throat. The wings are streaked whitish, and there is a yellow shoulder patch. The bill is pink.
The female is duller and lacks the black throat. Her bill is blackish. Immature birds are very distinctive, having olive-brown upperparts with a white rump and yellow throat and upper breast.The greater honeyguide feeds primarily on the contents of bee colonies (“hives”): bee eggs, larvae and pupae; waxworms; and beeswax. (Honeyguides are among the few birds that can digest wax.) It frequently associates with other honeyguides at hives; immatures dominate adults, and immatures of this species dominate all others. Like other honeyguides, the greater honeyguide enters hives while the bees are torpid in the early morning, feeds at abandoned hives (African bees desert more often than those of the temperate zones), and scavenges at hives robbed by people or other large animals, notably the ratel or honey badger. Most remarkably, it also guides people to hives.[2] The greater honeyguide also catches some flying insects, especially swarming termites. It sometimes follows mammals or birds to catch the insects they flush, and joins mixed-species flocks in ones and twos. It has been known to eat the eggs of small birds.
Guiding is unpredictable and is more common among immatures and females than adult males. A guiding bird attracts a person's attention with wavering, chattering "'tya' notes compounded with peeps or pipes",[3] sounds it also gives in aggression. The guiding bird flies toward an occupied hive (greater honeyguides know the sites of many hives in their territories) and then stops and calls again. As in other situations, it spreads its tail, showing the white spots, and has a "bounding, upward flight to a perch", which make it conspicuous. If the followers are native honey-hunters, when they reach the hive they incapacitate the adult bees with smoke and open the hive with axes or pangas (machetes). After they take the honey, the honeyguide eats whatever is left.[4]
