Regent honeyeater: Endangered bird 'has forgotten its song'
A rare songbird has สูตรเล่นสล็อต ให้แจ็คพอตแตก become so threatened that it has
started to lose its song, say scientists.
The regent honeyeater, once abundant in south-eastern Australia, is now listed as
critically endangered; just 300 individuals remain in the world.
"They don't get the chance to hang around with other honeyeaters and learn what
they're supposed to sound like," explained Dr Ross Crates.
His findings are published in the UK Royal Society journal Proceedings B.
Dr Crates, a member of the Difficult Bird Research Group at the Australian National
University in Canberra, is now trying to preserve the birds' song by teaching captive
honeyeaters the songs of their wild relatives.
'Needle in a haystack'
The researchers had not set out to study the song of the regent honeyeater,
but simply to find the birds.
"They're so rare and the area they could occupy is so big - probably 10 times
the size of the UK - that we were looking for a needle in a haystack," said Dr Crates.
During this painstaking search, he started to notice birds that were
"singing weird songs".
He recalled: "They didn't sound anything like a regent honeyeater - they sounded
like different species."
Teaching birds to sing
In a note of conservation hope, the scientists are using their recordings of wild birds
to teach captive honeyeaters their own song.
There is already a project to release captive-bred regent honeyeaters into the wild
every few years, to boost the population.
"But if those male birds are singing a weird song, the females might not mate with
them," explained Dr Crates. "So we hope that if they hear what they should be
singing, they will learn to sing it themselves."作者: kldahs0d81h 時間: 2021-3-21 16:26
