Extinction looms for a bird that has forgotten how to sing

SONGS DON'T work if you sing out of tune. And if you don’t learn how to sing properly in the first place, out of tune is how you are likely to sing. For humans, that can be embarrassing. For Regent honeyeaters, a species of Australian bird, it may prove far worse than that. Ross Crates and Robert Heinsohn of the Australian National University, in Canberra, who study these endangered avians, reckon that the problems the males of the species now have in learning the songs required to court the females of the species may result in this particular species becoming extinct.Widespread habitat loss has seen the Regent honeyeater population decline below 400, and those individuals are scattered sparsely across the remaining 300,000km of their habitat. Close encounters between the sexes are therefore rare in any case. But the success of those encounters which do occur depends on the male singing to the female’s satisfaction. Since the sparsity of the population also makes it hard for males to learn from their elders how to do this (a problem amplified by the fact that these singing lessons need to happen before a male is a year old) success is by no means assured.