Side Flight

MAPS

For a static form, maps are full of movement. Contained within the blotches that represent bird populations are histories of individual birds, decade upon decade, who, making flights and making themselves known to people, have shaped the geographical contours of these mapped areas.³⁵ These contours are traces of historical contact zones: brief moments where birds have come into view—or more specifically yet, come into the view of one of those particular humans who knew how to recognise them as a member of a given species and to record their presence. Yet, within these maps, we cannot observe the movement at play. These maps are historical archives rather than guides. They cannot tell
us where to look or what to see. Maps are unable to reveal
the ebbs and flows of flocks and the individuals who
comprise them.

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Warragamba

Most of the remaining regents are thought to nest in the
Blue Mountains, on Sydney’s western edge. Much of this
area is made up of national parks, several of which are world heritage listed. On paper, at least, it is a highly protected conservation area. In recent years, however, this area has become the subject of a heated controversy centring on a proposal from the New South Wales state government to raise the wall of the Warragamba Dam. The extra height would not be used to store water permanently, but rather to catch water during storm events with the aim of reducing flooding on the increasingly urbanised western fringes of Sydney that lie below. There is debate about how much difference this increased wall height would really make for flood mitigation, and critics claim that the primary aim of the proposal is to enable greater urban development in flood prone lands. But above the wall, much is at stake too. Any water held back would flood areas of national park in the Burragorang Valley, likely having to be held there and slowly released over a period of weeks. These waters would destroy a range of significant cultural sites for the Gundungurra people, whose lands were already significantly flooded by the building of the existing dam. As Gundungurra woman Taylor Clarke put it in her submission to the 2018 NSW Parliamentary Inquiry into the raising of the dam: ‘We have sacrificed enough and we
will not lose the precious little we have left.’²⁶

Of course, regent futures are also significantly threatened by this proposal. The best regent nesting habitat is usually found amongst the trees that grow right along the riverbank. These are the lands that would be flooded first. Inundation of this land, even temporarily, would likely kill the trees that regents rely on and so upset the ability of this whole region to support nesting activity in some, and perhaps most, years.
It should be noted that while regents currently nest in two other sites, beyond the Blue Mountains, these sites are home to considerably smaller populations, and the latest modelling suggests that they will likely both disappear entirely in the next five years.²⁷ In short, if the species is to have a future at all, it will rely on the nesting habitat provided by the Blue Mountains. As such, there is no way of avoiding the conclusion that this is a proposal that will almost certainly destroy an area of forest that is a vital, irreplaceable, component of the sustaining matrix of this species.

With the change of government in NSW in early 2023, this threat has subsided. The new government has announced that they will not be pursuing this proposal. Whether this is a short–term or a permanent reprieve, remains to be seen.

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Elusive Female Songs

Listening to birds at the change of seasons, Vinciane
Despret writes of a kind of metamorphosis, which happens
for a songbird, when suddenly song takes on a new kind of importance. In the literature on song it is the male who takes centre stage, it is his song, his territory, his courtship. This has so much been the case that it has often been forgotten that female birds sing at all. It seems for male birds—often accompanied by male researchers—the importance of song (and so much else) has historically been tied closely to sex.³⁴

Much of the lack of interest in female song has to do with
its recognition as such, as song. While female birds express
a range of vocalisations, they often aren’t given the same importance. A firm distinction is often imposed between
‘call’ and ‘song’, with calls considered to be innate, fixed,
and relatively simple, while songs are learned and complex. The study of bird song has also been tied up in discussions
of evolutionary fitness, in which its functional roles in reproduction—through mate attraction/selection and territory—are everything.

In recent years, however, interest in diverse bird species has allowed birds to teach us of new socialites and possibilities. Through new attention, we are learning the diversity of female song and its evolutionary and social functions, which exceed the domains marked by males. Female regents fit comfortably into this story. While female birds sing a range
of vocalisations at the nest and to male partners, including a sort of ‘subsong' (a soft warble or chatter), they do not sing the types of songs found amongst males. There is, however,
much more to be learnt here. The songs of female regents, like those of many other species, have been almost
entirely unstudied.

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Captivity and Song

In 1995, a captive population of regents was established in
an effort to learn about these birds within the controlled proximity of the aviary. In captivity, researchers began to learn, for the very first time, basic details about regent diet, reproduction, fledging, and other common behaviours of concern for conservationists. It was only later that the quality and complexity of regent song culture emerged, when the conditions of captivity—the design of infrastructure, modes
of pairing and breeding, and song tutorage—were found to be producing birds with strikingly peculiar song variations and fascinating mimicry capabilities. As the decline of the species worsened, the focus of the captive population expanded to breeding and release, and birds that had been raised within captivity were sent out into the world, carrying their unusual songs with them.

Hover over birds
for play button

The songs of captive birds are not the only unusual ones. Amongst free-living birds, what has been considered, historically, a more complex, consistent, and recognisable cultural song—one that hung together through a tight set
of features—has begun to loosen around its edges and fray with the introduction of a wider set of variations.

The result of this change and the presence of unusual songs may be more consequential than it first seems. As we have seen, in its performance and in its similarities and differences, song plays vital roles in stitching avian socialities together. In many cases, birds with unusual songs seem not to have been able to weave themselves into the larger life of the species. They are far less likely to successfully join a flock and are sometimes found alone, wandering the forest. Released males are far less likely to pair with a female regent, whose preference for and selection of song is also constructed within free-living social worlds and cultural knowledges. Unable to make a life, particularly within the layered threats that regents face, such birds often won’t survive beyond a
few years. A regent needs its flock and its song if it is to be
a regent at all.

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The Study Of Bird Song

Through the fascination and curiosity of its human listeners, bird song has been transformed from a timely event into a timeless inscription. In its variously collected forms, song is recorded, interpreted, analysed and compared, and not without heated debate on, for example, the presence of nonhuman language, music, aesthetics, and culture.²⁸ Yet, despite these debates, the song of one bird is not contained within another: each expresses it own complexity and diversity. As studies of different birds and different songs proliferate, so too, do the accounts of birds using songs in different ways and to different ends.²⁹ Each song is nested
in its own assemblage, of places, temporalities, experiments, technologies, institutions and so on. How song travels, then, not through the air, but into the pages of biological texts is highly situated and consequential.

The history of knowing birds is one of differently attending
to them, particularly between the lab and the field, and the assemblages these spaces of knowledge-making are caught up within. The field is a site of the naturalist, often attentive to a particular place, time of day, and seasonal shifts, noting the detailed happenings and interactions going on amongst the trees. In the field, songs hold onto their context, they are made thick within phenomenological and phenological description of their variabilities. The lab is the site of the scientist, who in a more stable and consistent context, with the tools of analysis, is able to collect what is often considered to be more reliable and readable data. In this context, songs don’t require context, because the truth is isolated and extracted from their very structure.

It’s primarily through these methods of lab and field that scientists can say they know anything about bird song. Yet, these histories also trace a specific history of specific birds in specific places—we owe much of our knowledge to the Song Sparrow (Melospiza melodia) of North America, a bird at the centre of an overwhelming number of studies.

But for some other birds, like the Regent Honeyeater, few if any studies exist at all. Unlike song sparrows living within the shrubs of urban gardens, regents aren’t so easily studied. It is only in recent years, as a result of increased awareness of the loss of their vocal culture, that regent song is now receiving attention, confronted with the fact that most of their basic biology is still relatively unknown.

In attuning to song, then, in taking it seriously, biologists are layering a new avian way of life into the thickening accounts of bird song and its functions. When it comes to regents, in revisiting some of what has been lost through historical field recordings of their songs, naturalists and scientists are able to hold together place-specific knowledge, tracing cultural and regional song development from as early as the 1970s—the work of Vicki Powys has been central here.³⁰ In recent studies by Ross Crates and colleagues, historical and contemporary field recordings come together to find their place in the lab, where song structures are made visible, typified, and comparable, producing a humbling set of as yet unanswered questions on regent life and culture.³¹ Yet, it’s only through those who have attended to birds in the field, that we hear
not simply a lost cultural song, but the diverse forms of what regent song has been and may become across the intergenerational life of the species. And so, between lab
and field, through our very ways of knowing and listening,
we shape openings to possibilities for resilience and continuance for both these birds and their songs.

Side Flight

Animal Cultures

The study of bird song, and the development of regional dialects in birds and other nonhumans, relate to a broad,
and hotly contested, field of inquiry into animal cultures. Researchers in this field, from biology to anthropology and psychology, are interested in how animals pass down a way of life through the generations. Long overlooked in evolutionary biology due to a dominant focus on genetic forms of inheritance, work in animal cultures focuses on social learning as an alternative form of inheritance.³²

While there is no consensus in this field, in general terms
an animal culture is usually defined as a behaviour, or set of behavioural elements, which are socially acquired among a particular population. Much of this work focuses on single, distinctive, behaviours: like a distinctive way of preparing a food, or of singing. But some research considers broader suites of behaviours that, when taken together, constitute and produce a distinct way of life for a particular set of members of a species. These socially acquired behaviours are passed down, sometimes slowly accumulating and being refined. As
a result of this mode of transmission, cultural behaviours tend to be restricted to specific populations of a species, while not practiced by others, manifesting as a ‘within-species behavioural variation’.³³

In this context, we might understand the Regent Honeyeater story as one of a damaged ‘song culture’. But, perhaps from a slightly different perspective it might also be understood as an experiment in new forms of song and culture making. As a field of inquiry concerned with learning and ‘within-species’ variations, research on animal cultures has focused overwhelmingly on conspecific learning. Yet the trans-species mimicry of the regent reminds us that–for better or worse–not all ‘social learning’ occurs within the neat boundaries of our taxonomic categories.

A BIRD,
A FLOCK,
A song,

and

A FOREST:

The decline of
Regent Honeyeater life

Thom van Dooren, Zoë Sadokierski, Myles Oakey,
Timo Rissanen, Samuel Widin, Ross Crates

The south-eastern corner of the Australian continent was
once criss-crossed by the nomadic flight paths of the Regent Honeyeater. For hundreds of thousands of years, they winged their way up and down this vast continent, moving from forest to forest, feeding on the nectar of flowering eucalyptus trees. They travelled in ‘immense flocks’, comprising hundreds and perhaps thousands of birds.¹ We don’t know how many regents the forests and woodlands of this region once supported, but we know that they
were abundant.

Today, everything has changed.
Today, the species is just clinging to existence.

The decline of the regents is a story of the loss of the eucalypt
trees that they are so intimately tied to and dependent on. Since European colonisation and settlement, Australia’s forests have been cleared, fragmented, and degraded on a staggering scale, with much of the land converted to agriculture. In fact, across the country, roughly 50% of the forests have been lost, either completely cleared or severely modified. Amongst this general pattern, the forests of south-eastern Australia have been particularly hard hit.²

As a result of the destruction of their forests and woodlands, regents are thought to have been in decline for the past century
or so. In the 1970s, it was reported that their numbers appeared
to have drastically reduced, but it wasn’t until the late 1980s that ongoing surveys of regent populations really began. By this point the species was down to between 2,500 and 1,500 birds. Despite some conservation efforts, that trend has continued since. The most recent estimates are that there are now, at most, 300
birds remaining.³

Movements

Regent Honeyeaters (Anthochaera phrygia) are medium sized songbirds, about 20-25cm in length, and predominantly black
and yellow in colour. But this simple description does not do them justice. As their regal name implies, they are striking in appearance. As a regent moves through the air, its open wings reveal layered panels of yellow over black that lengthen to defined points, flaring out in bright yellow flashes against the subtler hues of the surrounding forest. When perched, with wings tucked away, the bird’s delicate frontal plumage becomes more noticeable: a cascade of highlights, blending a jet-black crown to a yellow underbelly, creating a stunning, seemingly embroidered, effect. At home amongst the trees, investigating the buds and needles of eucalypt flowers and mistletoe, regents perform a dangling, twisting, and leaping dance as they move between flowerings, feeding with
their distinctive honeyeater bills.

While regents spend their lives amongst the trees, there is still an awful lot that scientists don’t know about the places they live in, as well as about their connections to these places. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that most of what is known by science about regent geography is focused on only one portion of their lives: the nesting period. Occurring across seven months of the year, from July through to January, regents become tied to particular patches of land, their breeding territories.⁴ There, they build their nests, and leading into spring, they lay their eggs, and they fledge their young together. In years past, when regents were still found in large numbers, pairs of breeding birds would have clustered their territories together in their hundreds, or even thousands when conditions allowed. These large nesting aggregations would have been vibrant and noisy affairs. Early in the season, male birds would have performed their polyphonic courtship songs. Later, as chicks began to hatch, they would have quieted somewhat, as parents directed their attention to the generation to come.

Today, regent breeding sites tend to be relatively solitary affairs, with the majority occupied only by a single pair of birds.

But, whether large or small, these nesting sites cannot occur on
any old patch of land. As the ‘honeyeater’ part of the name implies, breeding birds require access to nectar. Specifically, the nectar of
a small number of eucalyptus species, especially the yellow box (Eucalyptus melliodora). This nectar-rich diet is supplemented with lerp when necessary and complimented by the inclusion of a range of insects. During the breeding period, birds keep close to the nest. They tend to gather nectar from one tree, and then another, and then another, moving to a new tree as flowers are depleted or as others burst forth with goodness.⁵ But they remain tied to their nests throughout these movements, as if bound by an invisible cord. They stay close to guard the nest itself, so that other birds don’t fly off with their nesting materials. They stay close to look after their partner. And, of course, they stay close to watch over their eggs, and once they hatch, their chicks. During this period, their range usually doesn’t extend beyond about 200 meters from the nest and its cares.⁶ As a result of this specialised diet and this constricted range of movement, regent nesting sites need to be places particularly rich in eucalyptus flowers, of the right kind,
and at the right times.

Just as importantly, these places need to not already be a home
to too many regent predators or competitors, including birds like currawongs (Strepera graculina) and noisy miners (Manorina melanocephala) and mammals like brush-tailed possums (Trichosurus vulpecula) and sugar gliders (Petaurus breviceps). Amongst their competitors are a variety of other birds, some of whom are also vying for similar resources, and others of whom simply don’t like other birds in their general vicinity while nesting and will relentlessly harass and even kill to achieve that outcome.

While this might not sound like a particularly long list of requirements for suitable habitat, as we will see, patches of land like this are in increasingly short supply. In fact, it is thought that regent breeding activity is now restricted to three small areas in the states of Victoria and New South Wales (NSW)⁷, with the significant majority of this breeding taking place in one of these areas, the greater Blue Mountains on the western edge of Sydney. Within the Blue Mountains area, key nesting sites are located in the Capertee Valley, the Burragorang Valley, and the Upper and Lower Hunter Valleys. Rather than using only one of these sites exclusively, these places together form a landscape complex with birds moving between them from year to year, depending on which offers access to their requirements.

Hover over the Honeyeater
below for play button

There is undoubtedly much that we do not know about these nesting sites, including where some of them are and which factors matter most to birds in selecting them. Nonetheless, this is the (relatively) well-known part of the geography of the species. The bit we really know very little about is what happens for the other five months of the year. When the nesting season comes to an end, family groups join together to form larger flocks including both adults and newly independent juveniles.⁸ And, they set off.

During this nomadic period, regents are known to travel large distances. When not breeding, their habitat requirements are significantly less strict, as they’re free to move and forage over
a much wider area. Research indicates that there is at least some gene flow going on between the three remaining breeding sites, each separated from its nearest neighbour by around 500 kms.
As such, birds must be moving between these places—or meeting up somewhere else. But these kinds of long-distance movements between these groups are thought to be rare.⁹ And yet these movements happen, and they give rise to many questions: how do birds from distant parts of the country find one another? Is the knowledge of these other groups held within the flock and passed on? Do birds generally undertake these long journeys together, or in groups? Are they older birds or younger ones? Males, females,
or both? These are just some of the many topics that we know almost nothing about.

Distributions

The nomadic way of life of the regent is hard to represent on
a map. A map with a simple shaded species range—like the ones found in bird books—shows all the spots that a regent might, in theory, pop up during the course of a year. On the basis of this
kind of map, it might be assumed that regents are still widely distributed. While this shaded area has gradually shrunk in bird books across the decades, taken in isolation, even the most recent of such maps might still give the impression that there is plenty of suitable habitat left for these birds. But on the ground, things are much more complex.

Side flight

While the shrinking of these distribution maps over the years does tell an important part of the regent story, it also fails in important ways to capture the gravity of the situation. Within this vast area, only a select few sites now seem to provide suitable habitat for breeding. It is the precipitous decline of these particular, resource-abundant, forests and woodlands in which birds can successfully breed and fledge young that is thought to be the key factor driving the species towards extinction.

The forest and woodland areas that regents once nested amongst have been lost to agriculture and development on a staggering scale. Across the continent, nearly 40 per cent of Australia’s mature native forests have been completely cleared.¹⁰ But in some parts of the regent’s range, the situation is even worse than this. For example, in lowland temperate areas in Victoria, in the southern part of regent’s range, an estimated 66 per cent of the old, mature, eucalypt forests are gone.¹¹ While the scale of loss is immense, the way in which it has taken place is also highly significant. The forest that has been left behind does not function as it once did. Instead, patchy, fragmented, and thinned forest and woodland sections are split by roads, paddocks, plantations, fence lines, and concrete. In short, this is a history, and an ongoing story, not only of deforestation but of severe forest degradation.¹² As a result, remnant forested fragments are often left exposed to nutrient leeching and run-off from paddocks, landowner logging, insufficient hazard reduction burning, and soil compaction with understory loss.¹³

The fragmentation of these areas, in these particular ways, has severed or damaged the connective processes and relationships that once enabled not only the lives of regents, but those of many other forest and woodland species. These connectivities allowed regents to respond to the profound indeterminacy of their habitat geographies and climatic conditions. The movements of the birds shifted, season by season, year by year, to accommodate the temporal, climatic, and geographical specificity of resources; their flight paths moved with the flows of the forest. Eucalypts might flower for two weeks in one spot, then another two in another spot, then on to another. For successful regent breeding to take place, diverse patches of land and their resources need to be stitched together to make something bigger, to create a sustaining matrix.

In a context of forest abundance, this indeterminacy isn’t necessarily an issue; in scarcity, indeterminacy is the difference between life and death. Each fragment of habitat that remains continues to offer up limited and timely gifts to birds, but fragments in absence of abundance cannot stand in for the offerings of vast and expansive forests and woodlands.

Importantly, over much of the period that forests have been disappearing or becoming more and more patchy, the indeterminacy of their offerings has also been increasing as a result of the impacts of a changing climate. The increased frequency and severity of bushfires is one of the biggest concerns. In the catastrophic 2019–2020 bushfire season, for example, almost half
of the regents’ known breeding sites were impacted. These fires and their effects are layered into other climate-induced events, from increased flooding to prolonged droughts. In addition to killing adult birds, their nestlings, and their eggs, these events also transform the remaining forest. Especially where disturbance intervals are too short, they reduce flowering events and the maturation of trees, altering the distribution, timing, and abundance of the eucalyptus flowers and mistletoe that honeyeaters are so dependent on.¹⁴

The shifting distribution of regents reminds us that the intergenerational life of an animal species is something that takes place in, and is constituted by, a constellation of networked places: a sustaining matrix. Some species need nesting places, some need foraging places, others need wintering, hibernating, or estivating places. More accurately, they each need a combination of places. These places might be located close to one another (from whose perspective?), or they might be connected by significant journeys. Whatever the details—and the details do matter—the life of an individual organism, and the intergenerational life of a species, is something that does not, and cannot, take place in a single place. Rather, it is a weaving together of and in multiple places. We are
not talking here about habitat types, or kinds of places, but actual, concrete, specific locations in the world. Some of these places are interchangeable with others that satisfy similar requirements, some of them are not—for a variety of ecological, climatic, behavioural, and even cultural reasons. Some of these places are abundant and substitutable if needed; others are scarce. Some are reliably stable; others are constantly changing. Attending to sustaining matrices is an effort to account for these kinds of specific relationships with place: to foreground the emplacedness of modes of intergenerational becoming in their situated particularity.

But to name these vital ‘place–networks’ in this way is only
the first step. In the case of the regents, how do we convey the significance, the shifting contours, the fragility, of the sustaining matrix of their way of life? Is it even possible to map these kinds of places, these webbed possibilities, in the midst of a species range that encompasses millions of hectares of land? How can we capture the fact that when one nodal place is lost, birds cannot simply move next door, or move somewhere else across this vast territory? Instead, with the loss of one small patch of habitat, a whole network of places might become more precarious, or
simply unviable.

Side flight

Densities

As the regent population dwindles, the species is increasingly facing new challenges to its survival. In a pattern that oddly
mirrors their required abundance of forests, it seems that regents themselves must also exist in relatively high numbers—be, themselves, abundant—in order to survive. The highly dispersed, nomadic, way of life of the species is one that only really works at certain densities, with a critical mass of birds moving around the landscape, able to encounter one another, to learn from one another, to reproduce with one another. Once numbers drop below that level, as they now have, the species enters into something like a death spiral in which its whole way of life starts to come undone.

On one level it is obvious that the number of birds remaining matters for the survival of the species. Afterall, endangered species are precisely those of which there are few individuals left (along with a downward trajectory in those numbers). But in some cases that number matters more profoundly. This is one of those cases.
It matters because the particular way of life of that species starts
to become less and less viable with smaller numbers. Biologists refer to these dynamics as ‘Allee effects,’ in which a decreasing population size also decreases the average fitness of the remaining individuals.¹⁵ In some cases, when a population declines below a certain number of individuals—below a certain group size or a certain density—the ongoing life of the population, and perhaps
the species, simply becomes impossible.

For regents, it matters so much that ‘small population size’ is
now listed as the number one ‘threatening process’ for the species.¹⁶ In explaining this situation, the authors of the official Recovery Plan for the species point in particular to the loss of large nesting aggregations. When nesting in a bigger group, birds and their eggs and chicks would have been safer from predators and competitors. The same goes for feeding in larger flocks. As regents are smaller than many of the other nectar-feeding birds found in their range, they have had to rely on their numbers.¹⁷ The most significant competitor in much of the regent’s range is a group of little grey birds with bright yellow beaks called Noisy Miners. These birds hang out in large groups and are generally characterised by biologists with the use of terms like ‘highly aggressive,’ ‘strongly territorial,’ and even ‘despotic’.¹⁸ Where they occur in high enough densities, miners simply exclude regents, driving them out of the area. In lower densities, some regents can continue to nest but they seem to have much less success at it, likely because some eggs or chicks are killed and because parents need to invest much of their time and energy in conflicts with miners.

Regents and miners have both long inhabited many of the
same forests and woodlands in south-eastern Australia. But while landscape changes over the past century have reduced regent numbers, they have simultaneously driven an incredible increase
in the population of miners. These birds thrive around the disturbed edges of fragmented wooded areas. The fact that this is now the condition of so much of southeastern Australia has enabled miners to, in the words of one study, catalyse a widespread ‘phase shift’ towards ecological dysfunction.¹⁹

Hover over the Honeyeater
below for play button

There are a range of other forest and woodland birds who matter
in these interactions too, species that are often found inhabiting the same patches of land. Many of these bird species are also impacted on by Noisy Miners and are also vulnerable to extinction, including the including the Brown Treecreeper (Climacteris picumnus), the Hooded Robin (Melanodryas cucullata), the Turquoise Parrot (Neophema pulchella), the Speckled Warbler (Chthonicola sagittata), and during the winter months the critically endangered Swift Parrot (Lathamus discolor). These are species that can readily co-habit with regents in the same nesting sites. As a general rule, these other species are also less picky than regents about where they nest. As a result, in places where regents are found nesting, many of these species now tend to be found as well. In this context, regents are both an indicator species for good quality habitat for many other bird species, and an umbrella species whose conservation has significant benefits for these others, too.

SONGS

But this is only one part of the story of how low regent numbers
are undermining the way of life of the species. Over the last decade in particular, a growing body of research has explored how changes in the songs regents sing might be both a product of, and contributing to, their low population numbers. As Ross Crates, one of the authors of this article and one of the biologists behind this research, has put it elsewhere: ‘Low population density appears to be compromising the ability of some individuals to learn the species-specific song, probably due to a lack of other Regent Honeyeater demonstrators to learn songs from during a critical song-learning period in early life’.²⁰

As with many birds, the ‘function’ of the male regent’s song is generally understood to be that of attracting a mate and defining and holding a territory. In the past, when these birds nested in large aggregations, the territories of pairs would have pushed right up against one another, creating spaces of interaction around their edges, filled with song and the occasional squabble. While we’re often tempted to imagine the borders of animal territories as sites of intense conflict and competition over resources, perhaps as Vinciane Despret has argued, it makes more sense to turn things
on their head and understand songbird territories as being, in large part, ‘a pretext to sing.’²¹ In making this argument, Despret emphasises the diversity and complexity of what is at stake in territorial interactions between birds, highlighting the ways in which they also allow for the emergence of predictable and secure social relationships between neighbours, as well as information exchange, and creative artistry—all of which might bring their own ‘selective advantages’ for the birds involved, while also vitally contributing to the richness and complexity of what it means to
live as a bird. In short, far from being a simple story of competitive individuals, territory is also an ornate structure for the emergence and maintenance of a vibrant form of community.

Side flight

However we understand why birds sing—and there is surely more than one ‘why’—when it comes to regents, this singing quietens later in the nesting season. As a result, when chicks hatch, they’re unlikely to hear their own parents sing. This means that regents tend not to learn their song directly from their parents. Instead,
for young birds, song learning happens in a critical, sensitive, period in the first months of their lives after they fledge (leave the nest). During this time, they develop much of what will be their song for life. But this song is not simply a copy of another bird’s,
nor is it made up from scratch. Rather, young birds are thought to learn their songs by listening to and copying the songs of a variety of older males, combining them but also improvising, to produce
their own particular, nuanced, variations.

As a result, each regent sings its own unique songs, albeit ones
that are heavily influenced by its particular social group. Across generations, birds collectively twist and redo song elements in new patterns and variations. These song patterns and variations, while always in flux, ebb and flow around a recognisable and reliable set of features, if not to most human ears then at least to those of the birds. Given the vast geographical distance between regent groups—from Chiltern in Victoria to Capertee Valley in NSW and on up to the Northern Tablelands in northern NSW—these variations create distinctive song features, giving rise to what scientists refer to as regional song ‘dialects’.²² Dialects become a matter of learning not just how to make a song, but how to listen, to interpret; how to make meaning and make a life together.

These distinctive dialects matter. They alter the degree to
which birds are responsive and attracted to one another as potential mates. In studies conducted over the past several decades, researchers have used recorded songs collected from different parts of the regent’s range. Playing these recordings back—both in different places, and in different years—they have been able to capture the way in which regent songs shift across both space and time, and the difference this makes for the receptivity
of listening female birds.

Playback of song and mewing calls recorded in 1995 at Capertee Valley elicited more response from Regent Honeyeaters in Capertee Valley in 1996, than from Regent Honeyeaters near Armidale the same year, indicating that the birds were more sensitive to calls
of their direct neighbours, than to calls of birds 300 kilometres distant. The 1995 taped song phrases did not attract birds in 2008 at Capertee Valley, however birds were attracted by the
mewing calls.²³

Song, not in a general or abstract sense, but in its intimate particularities, stitches regents together socially. It creates a
‘we’ of sorts. In this way, song also plays a key role in stitching generations together, enabling birds to meet, to pair up, and so to form the relationships that lead to reproduction. At the same time, a bird’s dialect is thought to play a role in enabling other birds of the same species that have set up their own breeding territories nearby to identify it as a non–threatening presence. The theory—called the ‘dear enemy hypothesis’—is that where key similarities exist between the songs of neighbours, each can be reassured that the other is a local, not a recent interloper, and so is more likely to respect established territorial boundaries.²⁴ This situation allows birds to minimise their aggressive territorial interactions with others of their species and focus on their young.

Side flights

Clearly, which songs a bird sings matters, both for its own social and reproductive possibilities, but also, now more than ever, for
the future of the species.

These days, however, the variability in the songs that regents
are singing is much greater than the dialect differences between Capertee Valley and Armidale. These days, when those few Regent Honeyeaters still hatched in the forest are old enough to leave their parents’ territory—at about 40 days of age, still during that sensitive period in their song development—they’re lucky to find any other regents to learn from. And so, instead, they now seem to be learning the songs of the other species that they share their
forests with, the songs of wattlebirds and friarbirds, of
currawongs and rosellas.

Unravelling

This change in regent song cultures will likely further hasten the decline of the species, undermining the potential for birds to find one another and cement the relationships needed to bring the next generation into the world. But, as we have seen, this transformation of song goes hand in hand with the undermining of other key elements of the regent way of life, including collective nesting and flocking behaviours, and the nomadic wanderings that productively stitch patches of country together. Here we see that extinction does not arrive all at once; it is an unravelling, an undoing, of ways of life, of intricately entwined social and ecological relationships.
An organism’s way of being in the world can be, and often is, lost long before that final death. Lost in a way that not only foretells,
but in its own way helps also to bring about, that ultimate loss
that is an extinction.

In regent lifeways, the song and the bird hold each other in the world. Neither can endure without the other. The song in turn both comes from and helps to create the flock, and so the song and the flock also hold each other in the world. The flock and the bird are also integral to one another’s continued existence, with specific densities and practices of collective life being essential. Ultimately then, perhaps it makes sense to say that a regent is its song, it is its flock. There is no ‘bird’ without these vital components of its way of life, at least not for long.

Of course, none of this is static and fixed. Species are evolving; individual birds are growing and developing; songs are shifting across space and time; and flocks are only ever loose aggregations that change as individuals come and go throughout the seasons and the years. And yet, despite all this change, these things—species, organisms, flocks, songs—maintain a kind of resonance and continuity that allows them to shift with one another, and so to continue to fulfil their roles in maintaining one another’s lives and possibilities. Or at least, they have done until recent decades when this intimate interdependency has begun to unravel.

At the heart of this unravelling, as we have seen, are seemingly mundane issues of scale, questions about distributions and densities. The collective, richly sonic, way of life of the regents happens in place, in particular places, across and between these places that together constitute a sustaining matrix. The number
of regents and the size of the area over which they are spread at different times of the year, matter in complex, non-linear, ways.
At the most fundamental level, birds need to meet each other to reproduce. But these are equations that cannot be reduced to something like billiard balls bouncing around a table, either bumping into each other or not. Our billiard balls—our birds—are not static, pre-existing, entities. Rather, they are in-the-making.
As such, the birds’ modes of being—their capacity to hear and be heard by one another, that is to meet one another successfully
and meaningfully—are partly a result of the densities at which
they occur and so their past meetings and the possibilities they have had to learn from and become-with one another.

But even after they’ve successfully met, birds need to find a
suitable nesting site. They need to be able to maintain a territory and feed and fledge chicks. This too, we have seen, is a possibility that is significantly enabled or disabled by regent distributions and densities which are thought to be directly connected to their ability to suppress competitors. In this way, regents actively craft their own environment. It too is not static and pre-given. Key elements of the landscape—like the impacts of predators and competitors—are collectively re-shaped by regent communities. But only up to a point. Breeding in aggregations leads to greater success, it allows regents to persist in areas occupied by more of their competitors; but it can’t bring back cleared areas of forest and woodland, and it can’t even always push back against the expansion of the miners that accompanies this ecological disturbance. Nonetheless, in important ways the regent story is one of actively, collectively, crafting a social and ecological environment.²⁵

In this regent story, distributions and densities come together to do, or undo, possibilities for songs, for flocks, for individual birds, and ultimately for their species. They come together to do or undo the work of generations.

When it comes to regents, much of what is taking place in this corner of Australia is a story of unravelling and loss. But there is
still hope, even if not for all. As we have seen, alongside helping to create an environment for themselves, regents have become an umbrella species for many other forest and woodland birds. While they might not actively create spaces for these other species to thrive, they do seem to be a very reliable indicator of such a space. In this way, regents have—via their human conservation helpers—become important allies for all these species. Wherever regents
are found nesting, conservationists are now seeking to protect
that place as habitat for all the birds, and the species, that it might shelter. In fact, this is explicitly, and more than a little tragically, how some of the biologists who are centrally involved in this conservation effort understand their work. From this perspective, it’s highly likely that the regent will be lost. The damage has already been done. While they hope that they are wrong; they fear that they are not. But either way, according to this view, it still matters that we try to hold onto the regents. It matters because we owe them at least that much consideration. But it matters also because it is not yet too late for these other species, for the speckled warbler, the turquoise parrot, and the black-chinned honeyeater. Their songs can still be heard in the forest; their flocks still gather and take
to the air.

Perhaps most significantly of all, working to hold onto regents forces us to confront the significant limitations of our current possibilities for knowing and shaping worlds. We simply do not understand—and perhaps cannot understand—how all these
species wove themselves together in patterns of flight, song, nesting, feeding, and so much more. In the face of the intricacies, complexities, and uncertainties, of regent life, we are powerfully reminded of our inability to effectively put the pieces of life back together once they have been broken apart. While the effort
to repair matters, the profound challenges of doing so should remind us, quite simply, that we must also cherish and
safeguard what still remains.