Lyrebirds will make a few appearances in my forthcoming book. Mostly because they are are an outstanding and visible indicator of animal impactWhat is Animal Impact? Without wildlife, Earth would not be habitable for humans, because it's animals that stabilise ecosystems. It’s a fundamental law of nature that animals (and humans) exist because we are the most likely lifeforms to minimise environmental chaos. Animal impact, therefore, is a measure of how much all wildlife is collectively responsible for creating a habitable Earth. The More and the origin of most of the world’s songbirds. Birds are the largest and most ubiquitous of Earth’s land-based megafaunaThe largest animals that represent the top of the trophic pyramid. These are the final building blocks in ecosystem structures for maximum entropy production. Megafauna can be measured at any spatial scale. The largest animal that ever lived on Earth is the Blue Whale. In a grassland, spiders could be considered megafauna The term is generally reserved for animals larger More.
A study by Alex Maisey in the foothills of the Dandenong Ranges near where I live, has quantified the impact they have on the forests’ soil ecology [1].
Alex has discovered that a single lyrebird moves about 350 tonnes of soil every year, that being far more than any terrestrial mammal.
In the 20 years I’ve lived and walked these forests, lyrebirds have become far more abundant, thanks in part to fox control measures. Hopefully the repatriation of lyrebirds has happened fast enough that the forest ecology can recover (we know that the longer animals are absent, the harder it is for landscapes to return to a stable state).
The true value of these and many other birds, will only be realised in decades to come. It could be centuries longer before we see the impact of the work of lyrebirds on soils and freshwater, as the mountain ash trees that dominate the skyline, reproduce over timescales of hundreds of years and the ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More they evolved to stabilise have been connected with them for 40 million more.
- Maisey, A. C., Haslem, A., Leonard, S. W. J., and Bennett, A. F.. 2021. Foraging by an avian ecosystem engineer extensively modifies the litter and soil layer in forest ecosystems. Ecological Applications 31( 1):e02219. 10.1002/eap.2219
