Thursday, 18 September 2025
As Bird of the Year heats up, we’re championing some of our most critically endangered contenders, like the Regent Honeyeater. To find out why this ‘jewel of the woodlands’ deserves your vote, we spoke with Mick Roderick, BirdLife Australia’s Regent Honeyeater Recovery Advisor, about the fight to save this quintessentially Australian bird from extinction.
Nominations are open for Guardian/Birdlife Australia Bird of the Year 2025. Share your thoughts on which birds should be included in this years poll.
Regent Honeyeaters are uniquely and quintessentially Australian. Just like the swaggies of early European Australia used to roam the countryside in search of work, Regent Honeyeaters once roamed the abundant woodlands on the flats of south-eastern Australia.
They specialise in seeking out the most productive patches of habitat and are known as a “rich patch specialist”. However, this strategy has been their undoing because nearly all of that habitat has disappeared, and what is left is guarded by aggressive resident native birds.
The Regent Honeyeater, like the swagmen, epitomises the Aussie battler story. With fewer than 350 birds remaining, we need to get behind the ‘jewel of the woodlands’ so we don’t lose this archetypal Aussie bird.
Regent Honeyeaters are striking birds, characterised by their famous black and yellow colouring, especially the chainmail patterning on the breast. Their black head contrasts with the bright yellow of the belly and tail, a contrast that is most easily seen when the bird is flying.
They have a unique, bare “warty” patch around the eye, which helps to distinguish them from superficially similar honeyeaters such as the New Holland Honeyeater (which are sparrow-sized; Regents are midway between these small honeyeaters and the familiar Noisy Miner in size).
Their call is also unique, being a soft, rollicking chortling interspersed with audible bill-clapping that is diagnostic of the wattlebird family, to which Regents were added about 20 years ago.
Regent Honeyeaters once roamed the vast tracts of woodlands in south-eastern temperate Australia. Their nomadic lifestyle and predilection for the highest quality areas with maximum nectar-yielding trees meant that once the vast majority of that habitat was lost, the highly mobile flocks had almost nowhere to go. During the late 1900s, their population and range declined rapidly.
Whilst other honeyeaters adapted to the modification of woodlands, Regents did not. Their strategy of roaming in flocks to dominate blossoming events was no longer viable, and numbers crashed. Today, it is thought there might only be around 300 birds left in the wild. Many months can pass without a single Regent being seen, and in some years (such as 2022) not a single successful nest is detected.
BirdLife Australia has employed the Regent Honeyeater Recovery Coordinator since 2008 and is at the forefront of the species’ recovery efforts.
Along with key partners, BirdLife collaborates to implement a range of actions to thwart the extinction of our precious Regents. The recovery effort is underpinned by two key actions: facilitating successful breeding via nest-protection and predator/competitor control, and the periodic release of zoo-bred birds to bolster the drastically small wild population.
The Regent Honeyeater has also become an icon for the protection and restoration of temperate woodlands, and BirdLife has been central to habitat restoration efforts, particularly in their stronghold site of the Capertee Valley, NSW.
Due to their extremely small population, BirdLife and project partners strongly encourage people to report any Regent Honeyeaters they encounter.
The Critically Endangered Regent Honeyeater is a medium-sized honeyeater with striking black and yellow plumage.
If you see a Regent Honeyeater, let us know as soon as possible.
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