This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Christopher Intagliata.Some birds are relatively easy to study. Ross Crates studies the ones that aren’t.He’s part of the Difficult Bird Research Group at the Australian National University.“All our study species are quite challenging to study for various reasons, mostly because they’re really rare and highly mobile.”One of those “difficult birds” is the critically endangered regent honeyeater.They’re medium-sized songbirds―with bright yellow tails and black-and-white chests.And though they once roamed Australia in flocks of hundreds, fewer than 300 remain in the wild today.Crates and his team tracked the birds over a five-year period.If they encountered a male, they’d record his song.And they noted whether the males were paired up with females.They found that a quarter of the birds sang variations of the traditional honeyeater song.And 12 percent of the birds weren’t singing honeyeater songs at all.They were parroting different species’ songs―like this ... or this one...That could mean bad news for the birds’ future―because males singing those untraditional songs were also less likely to be paired up with a mate, compared to their counterparts who sang the standard tune.“As females breed less, then there’s obviously fewer males in that generation to teach the next generation.A higher proportion of males sing weird songs. And you get a bit of a positive feedback toward extinction.”The work appears in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
