I found this tidbit about superb fairy wrens and thought of your image. Whether the splendid variety practice the same or not and it's reasonable to imagine they do, they are remarkable little fellows.
Quote:
Diane Colombelli-Négrel, Sonia Kleindorfer, and colleagues from Flinders University in Australia discovered a remarkable way one bird fights back against brood parasites. Female superb fairy-wrens teach their embryos a “password” while they’re still in their eggs. Each female’s incubation call contains a unique acoustic element. After they hatch, fairy-wren chicks incorporate this unique [pass-code] element into their begging calls to ask for food.…[The] chicks whose begging calls most resembled their mothers’ incubation calls received more food. But the brood parasites of the fairy-wren, Horsfield’s bronze-cuckoos, produced begging calls that did not so closely resemble the parental password.1
Researchers conducted a playback experiment at 29 nests…broadcast[ing] either the song of Horsfield’s bronze-cuckoo or a neutral bird. After the cuckoo calls, but not after the neutral bird calls, female fairy-wrens made more incubation calls to their embryos.…[showing that] female fairy-wrens that heard a cuckoo near their nest increased their efforts to teach their password to their embryos.1
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Great picture.
