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This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher and Daljata.

Some birds are relatively easy to study. Roskrates studies the ones that aren't.

He's part of the difficult bird research group at the Australian National University.

All our study features are quite challenging to study for various reasons,

mostly because they're really rare and highly mobile, so.

One of those difficult birds is the critically endangered region honey eater,

their 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.

Krates 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 honey eater song,

and 12% of the birds weren't singing honey eater songs at all. They were parroting different species

songs, like this, or this one. That could mean bad news for the bird's 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.

...