In their search for bees, Mozambique’s honey hunters and birds share a language with regional dialects.

Honey hunters in Mozambique use a unique dialect to communicate with birds to find bees, and the adjustment could benefit both species, a new study has found.

This interaction is one of the few known examples of human-wildlife cooperation, the researchers reported in a study published in the journal People and Nature.

The Greater Honeyguide (Indicator Indicator) is a small brown bird found throughout southern Africa. It gets its name from the fact that it leads people to beehives.

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When a human hunter calls the bird, the bird responds with its own signals, leading the hunter to the honey.

This relationship holds true for both species. Humans discover the beehive, subdue the bees with fire, and destroy the hive to access the honey. Birds, on the other hand, eat the remaining wax and larvae, so they won’t die from bee stings.

“There are active adjustments being made for mutual benefit between humans and wildlife,” lead author Jessica van der Wal, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, told Live Science.

Honey hunters in different parts of Africa have their own ways of communicating with bee guides, and van der Waal and his colleagues wanted to find out whether bee signals differ even within the same region.

The international team recorded calls from 131 honey hunters in 13 villages in the Niassa Special Reserve in northern Mozambique, where the Yao people make a living from wild honey and honey guides.

They found that hunters’ trills, grunts, whoops, and whistles varied with the distance between villages, regardless of habitat. Interestingly, the honey hunters who migrated to the village adopted the local dialect.

It’s “like a different pronunciation,” van der Wal says. “They use one language for birds, but they have different dialects.”

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The study highlights how culturally we are as a species, van der Wall said. “Many animals have culture, and humans are driven by culture, even in our untrained interactions with wild animals,” she added.

Diego Gil, a behavioral ecologist at Spain’s National Museum of Natural Sciences who was not involved in the study, told Live Science that he was surprised that the calls did not change depending on habitat.

“From a human perspective, it’s interesting for human immigrants to new communities to learn how humans in that community interact with local birds,” he said.

It’s also possible that birds are reinforcing local dialects, said Philippe Heeb, a senior researcher at France’s National Center for Scientific Research who was not involved in the study.

“If honeyguides learn to respond preferentially to local signals, this preference should in turn strengthen local consistency in human signals,” he said.

The two species have likely worked together for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, he said, and by distinguishing between unfamiliar bee calls, the birds may be reinforcing local dialects and limiting their drift. “The ‘selection’ pressure exerted by honey guides may help explain the stability of dialect mosaics in human populations.”

Honeyguides don’t learn their behavior from their parents, Van der Wal said. They are brood parasites and lay their eggs in the nests of other birds.

“We believe that honeyguides learn from other honeyguides that interact with humans,” she says, and her group is investigating whether humans and birds influence each other’s cultures.

Van der Wal plans to expand on this research. She currently heads the Pan-African Honeyguide Research Network, documenting honeyguide behavior in various countries.

“We are currently consolidating all the data and expanding to new locations,” she said. “Human cultures have a huge amount of variation, not only in the signals and calls used, but also in their habits and interactions with honeyguides.”