Song Of The Week

Pity the Australian Regent Honeyeater, a distinctive black and yellow bird, of which only a few hundred now remain.

According to Dr Ross Crates from the Australian National University the key to their decline is that there are so few males around from whom the chicks can learn their mating songs. Increasingly, they have been reduced to mimicking the songs of friar birds and cuckoo shrikes and, understandably, the females are unimpressed.

Is it, though, a case of the chicken and the egg? Is it the case that there are just too few males anyway or is it there are few role models for the impressionable youngsters to imitate?

One of life’s mysteries, for sure.