On a winter morning in the temperate rainforests of southeastern Australia, before the light has fully reached the forest floor, a sound begins that does not belong.

It starts with a kookaburra’s laugh — unmistakable, rattling, absurd. Then a whipbird’s crack. Then the liquid cascade of a grey shrike-thrush. Then something stranger: the mechanical whirr of a camera shutter firing in rapid succession, the beep of a car alarm, the rising shriek of a chainsaw biting into wood. And beneath all of it, woven through like a thread, a rich, rolling, original song that belongs to none of these things and all of them at once.

You are listening to a lyrebird. And once you have heard one, you do not forget it.

The Architecture of an Impossible Voice

The superb lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae) is not, at first glance, a remarkable bird. It is roughly the size of a pheasant, brown and unassuming, scratching through leaf litter on the forest floor in search of insects, worms, and spiders. The female, in particular, is easy to overlook entirely.

The male is a different matter — but even his most famous feature, the extraordinary lyre-shaped tail that gives the bird its name, is kept folded and hidden for most of the year. It takes seven years to grow to its full length. It is displayed, in earnest, for only a few weeks during the winter breeding season. And when it is raised and fanned forward over the male’s head in full display, it is one of the most spectacular sights in the natural world: long silvery filamentary plumes framing two curved outer feathers that sweep upward like the arms of an ancient instrument.

But the tail is almost secondary to the voice.

The lyrebird possesses the most complex syrinx — the vocal organ of birds — of any songbird on earth. Where most birds have a relatively simple arrangement of muscles controlling their syrinx, the lyrebird has an extraordinarily sophisticated one, capable of producing sounds across a range and with a precision that no other bird can match. It can produce two independent sounds simultaneously. It can replicate acoustic structures — the overtones, the harmonics, the precise timing — of sounds it has heard only a handful of times. And it does not merely copy. It integrates, layers, and performs.

A Living Archive of the Forest

A male lyrebird’s song is not a fixed thing. It is a constantly evolving repertoire built from everything he has heard throughout his life — the calls of every bird species in his territory, the sounds of the forest itself, and, increasingly, the sounds of the human world pressing in around him.

Researchers studying lyrebirds in areas affected by logging have documented males incorporating the sounds of chainsaws into their songs — not as a novelty, but as a regular, integrated element of their repertoire, passed down through generations of birds long after the logging has stopped. In areas near roads, car alarms and camera shutters appear. Near human settlements, dogs, crying babies, and mobile phone ringtones have all been recorded. The lyrebird does not distinguish between natural and artificial sound. If it is acoustically interesting and present in his environment, it becomes part of his song.

This creates something extraordinary: a living acoustic archive of a landscape. The sounds a lyrebird sings today may contain echoes of a forest that no longer exists — species that have gone locally extinct, machinery that has long since been decommissioned, a soundscape preserved in the memory of a bird and passed, imperfectly but persistently, to the next generation.

The Performance and the Deception

The male lyrebird’s display is one of the most elaborate courtship performances in the animal kingdom. He constructs a mound of earth — sometimes several — in his territory, clears the surrounding area, and performs on this stage for hours each day during the breeding season. He fans his tail forward until the filamentary plumes cascade over his head like a veil, obscuring his body entirely, and sings.

The song serves multiple purposes simultaneously. It advertises his presence to females, who assess the quality and complexity of his repertoire as a measure of his fitness — a male with a richer, more varied song has survived longer, learned more, and is presumably better at surviving. It warns rival males away from his territory. And, researchers have recently discovered, it does something more calculated than either of these.

A 2021 study published in Current Biology documented male lyrebirds using mimicry as a tool of active deception during mating. When a female attempted to leave during copulation, males were observed mimicking the alarm calls of other species — the sounds that signal a predator is nearby — causing the female to freeze and remain in place. They also mimicked the mobbing calls of multiple species simultaneously, creating the acoustic illusion of a flock of birds responding to a threat, further reinforcing the female’s reluctance to move.

It was the first documented case of a bird using vocal mimicry to manipulate the behaviour of a mate. It reframed the lyrebird’s extraordinary voice not just as a display of fitness, but as an instrument of control.

A Forest Engineer

The lyrebird’s ecological importance extends well beyond its voice. It is one of the most significant ecosystem engineers in Australian temperate rainforests — a title earned not through drama but through relentless, daily labour.

A single lyrebird scratches through and turns over an estimated 200 tonnes of leaf litter and soil per year in its search for food. This constant disturbance aerates the soil, accelerates decomposition, distributes fungal spores, and creates the conditions in which new plant growth can establish. In forests where lyrebirds are absent, the leaf litter accumulates, the soil compacts, and the understorey changes measurably. The bird is, in a very real sense, maintaining the forest it lives in.

After the catastrophic Australian bushfires of 2019 and 2020, researchers studying recovery in affected areas found that lyrebird territories showed faster vegetation recovery than areas without them. The birds had survived in refugia — small unburned patches — and were already at work turning the ash-covered soil within weeks of the fires passing.

What We Stand to Lose

The superb lyrebird is not currently endangered. But its habitat — the temperate rainforests and wet sclerophyll forests of southeastern Australia — is under sustained pressure from land clearing, climate change, and the increasing frequency and intensity of bushfires. Introduced predators, particularly foxes and cats, take a significant toll on eggs and chicks. In some areas, populations are declining quietly, without the urgency that attaches to more charismatic threatened species.

What would be lost if the lyrebird disappeared is not just a bird. It is a voice that contains a forest. It is a soil engineer that maintains an ecosystem. It is an acoustic record of a landscape stretching back generations. And it is a reminder that the most extraordinary things in nature are sometimes found not in the obvious places — not in the largest, the fastest, the most dangerous — but in a brown bird on a mound of earth, singing a song that contains everything it has ever heard.

Have you ever heard a lyrebird’s mimicry in person — or heard a recording that stopped you cold? Share your experience in the comments below!