The sub population was discovered on a roadside stock route in Kings Plains National Park, close to the Severn River.

With less than 400 in the wild, Dr Laura Rayner from the Australian National University school of environment and society said the discovery was truly exciting.

“When you’re dealing with any animal where you’ve got a few hundred left, every single nest is going to count and every single chick that is reared from that nest is going to help the population,” she said.

“Finding more birds in a different area and the fact that they’re using that area to try and breed is really, really important.”

Dr Rayner said the researchers already knew certain areas such as the Capertee Valley were important breeding areas for the bird, partially due to more consistent surveying near cities. She said it was Australia’s amateur bird watchers that pointed to the under-surveyed New England Tablelands bioregion.

“The first stage of designing our monitoring program was to take all the observations that have been contributed by thousands and thousands of bird enthusiasts across Australia, who have been submitting records of these sightings for the last two decades.

“We took all those sightings and we started building species distribution models, and those models indicated that the north is actually really, really important for this species,” she said.

“While its range extends from Victoria up to Southern Queensland, our maps were really highlighting that Inverell and surrounding areas, those Northern Tablelands and North West bioregions as really, really critical for the bird.”

To detect the honeyeaters, researchers played recorded bird calls over a set of speakers. Over the next few days, birds began to respond and led them to their nests. 

“We were hoping we would detect them this year, but we were totally prepared to find far fewer birds and for it to take multiple years before we really started gathering important sightings,” Dr Rayner said.

“So the fact that we started gathering really good sightings in the first month was incredible, and it’s totally credited to the fact that Australian bird enthusiasts have been reporting these birds for the last two years.”

If you spot a bird, please take a photo, record the location and contact Regent Honeyeater Recovery Coordinator Dean Ingwersen on 1800 621 056 and Dr Rayner on 0418 414 487.