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The Recovery of the Regent Honeyeater – The Jewel of the Temperate Woodlands

The Regent Honeyeater is Australia’s rarest songbird. Once occurring across south-eastern Australia in large, raucous flocks and at times visiting flowering trees in suburban Sydney and Melbourne, the Regent Honeyeater is now on the precipice of extinction. It is estimated that fewer than 300 birds remain in the wild and it is listed as critically endangered; the final rung-on-the-ladder before being recognised as ‘extinct in the wild’. So rare is the Regent Honeyeater that it has been found to be learning the songs of other bird species, presumably due to the fact there are so few adult birds left for young birds to learn from. Regent Honeyeaters are also so rare that they are bred in zoos, not just to keep the species from disappearing altogether, but so that many of the zoo-bred birds will be released into the wild to supplement the critically low wild population. The talk will outline the ecology and decline of the Regent Honeyeater and the recovery actions that BirdLife Australia and its partner organisations are implementing to save the ‘jewel of the temperate woodlands’.

About the presenter:
Mick Roderick joined BirdLife in 2012 after stints in various government and private sector ecologist roles. He is now the NSW Woodland Bird Program Manager, based in Newcastle and working predominantly on the recovery of the Regent Honeyeater whilst concurrently achieving outcomes for other threatened and declining woodland birds. Mick is the current Vice President (and ex-President) of the Hunter Bird Observers Club, is a member of the NSW Ornithological Records Appraisal Committee, heads up the notorious Hunter Home Brewers Twitchathon team (and is a NSW coordinator and sits on the national Twitchathon committee) and, most challenging of all, arranges pelagic birding trips off Port Stephens (he openly admits to being a ‘petrel-head’).

Jul 27, 2022 06:00 PM in Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney