The wild population of Regent Honeyeaters will swell by 20% this week when Taronga Zoo releases 77 of the critically endangered birds produced through its breeding program.
Distinctive for its embroidered yellow plumage, the honeyeater is considered a “flagship” species: the most marketable of a group of endangered animals that share a habitat.
The zoo hopes that attracting funding and attention to the honeyeater will also benefit animals such as swift parrots, squirrel gliders and orange-bellied parrots.
Michael Shiels, from Taronga Zoo’s bird department, is stationed in Chilton, in regional Victoria, where 38 birds will be released on Saturday. Another 39 were set free earlier this week.
“It’s possible that there’s only 300 left in the world,” he said. “They only live on the eastern seaboard, though they used to be found from Brisbane all the way down to north-eastern Victoria.”
Habitat loss is the major culprit for their disappearance from the wild. “Since white settlement, about 80% of the country’s ironbark forests, their habitats, have been removed,” Shiels said.
In tandem with breeding programs, conservationists have been replanting ironbark trees in Chilton and Capertee Valley, in New South Wales, to house the non-migratory species. “There’s no point releasing an animal if there’s no habitat for it to return to,” he said.
Shiels said the preponderance of pigeons, seagulls and kookaburras in Australia sometimes obscured the fraught conditions facing native birdlife. One in five Australian birds are threatened, endangered or critically endangered.
The latter category refers to species whose populations have plummeted within the last decade or that number less than 50 adults.
The honeyeaters will be fixed with tiny, 1.9g transmitters to track their progress.
