Critically Endangered
Regent Honeyeater
Anthochaera phrygia
The regent honeyeater is a critically endangered bird endemic to southeastern Australia.
Appearance
The breast is covered with contrasting pale yellow speckles, and the feathers in the tail and wings are black and bright yellow.
Range and habitat
The regent honeyeater was once common in wooded areas of eastern Australia, especially along the inland slopes of the Great Dividing Range. It once could be found as far west as Adelaide, but is now gone from South Australia and western Victoria. As of June 2020 their range covers from north-east Victoria up to around the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, but the population is now scattered.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
Breeding mostly occurs from August to January, during the southern spring and summer. The breeding season appears to correspond with the flowering of key eucalyptus and mistletoe species.
Two or three eggs are laid in a cup-shaped nest. Nest success, and productivity of successful nests, has been found to be low in this species, with nest surveillance revealing high predation by a range of bird and arboreal mammal species.
In crisis
The regent honeyeater is a critically endangered bird endemic to southeastern Australia. The regent honeyeater is listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List, and was listed as endangered under both Australia's Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act)and Queensland's Nature Conservation Act 1992. The Action Plan for Australian Birds 2010, compiled by researchers from Charles Darwin University, and published in October 2011 by the CSIRO, added the regent honeyeater to the "critically endangered" list, giving habitat loss as the major threat.
The bird was upgraded from endangered to critically endangered nationally (under the EPBC Act) on 9 July 2015. Each state has applied its own rating to the bird under state legislation, varying from "threatened" (Victoria) to "critically endangered" (NSW).
Regent Honeyeater is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Regent Honeyeater, Wikidata item Q277355. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
