This Critically Endangered Bird’s Song Was About to Disappear. Scientists Saved It by Recruiting Some Wild Vocal Tutors

Wild-born male regent honeyeaters passed their cultural knowledge to young captive-born birds

Sara Hashemi | Daily Correspondent

March 24, 2026

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Less than a century ago, huge flocks of regent honeyeaters flitted all over southeastern Australia. Today, they’re one of the country’s most endangered birds. As their numbers dwindled, so did the complexity of males’ song—with potential consequences to their breeding success.

Now, researchers have restored the regent honeyeater’s traditional song by bringing in tutors: two wild-born male birds who passed their knowledge to captive-born birds. The work, described February 25 in the journal Scientific Reports, presents a fairly simple way to save animal cultures.

Fewer than 250 regent honeyeaters are estimated to remain in the wild, and past research has shown that many young males—unable to learn their own song from older birds—have been singing the sounds of other species or otherwise incorrect tunes. Meanwhile, captive-born birds have been singing melodies not heard in nature, which could reduce their chances of breeding and integrating into the wild.

How Australia's regent honeyeaters are learning the wrong songs

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That’s why a team of scientists worked to reintroduce the regent honeyeater’s traditional song to birds bred at two zoos in Australia, which took some trial-and-error. At the start, the researchers played recorded songs to juvenile birds “every day for about the first six months of their life”—a method that ultimately failed, says study co-author Daniel Appleby, a conservation biologist at Australian National University, to Donna Lu at the Guardian.

So, Appleby and his colleagues gave other young birds real teachers. Two wild-born males who knew the correct regent honeyeater tune spent their days alongside captive chicks. This time, the plan worked. “Three months in, we started hearing our first little renditions of a traditional wild song,” Appleby tells Emily Anthes at the New York Times.

The researchers soon learned that the teacher-to-pupil ratio mattered. “We realized that if you have too many birds to one tutor—so a big class size—they don’t learn as effectively,” Appleby says to the Guardian. They began to keep cohorts to no more than five students per teacher, and those who learned the song well sounded extremely similar to the wild birds. During the following year, many former pupils became vocal tutors themselves.

Within three years, the proportion of young birds that learned the traditional song went from 0 to 42 percent.

“It does seem to be that they could continue doing this for multiple generations in the same way, without too many problems, which is great,” says Rebecca Lewis, a conservation scientist at Chester Zoo in England who was not involved in the study, to the Times. “It’s a sustainable method.”

Today, more than half of the zoo-bred males sing songs close to the traditional one. The researchers hope that as they release more of these animals into the wild, the population will grow and the melody will spread. That’s especially important now, because the full version of the traditional song—taught by the original tutors—vanished from the wild during the study, so the captive-born birds are the only creatures carrying that cultural knowledge.

“We are extremely grateful to the two wild males recruited into the zoo population,” says study co-author Ross Crates, an ecologist at Australian National University, in a statement. “Without them, the traditional wild song would have been lost forever.”

Sara Hashemi | Read More

Sara Hashemi is a science writer and fact-checker currently based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Sierra, The Body, Maisonneuve magazine and more.