Andrew Skeoch

And that really puzzled me for a little while.

When we first moved here around 1999,

we had yellow tufted honey eaters in abundance around our house.

They were just everywhere.

I just thought, well, they're our honey eater.

They're the dominant honey eater.

But I also realized there are other honey eaters around.

There were fuscus, white ears, yellow-faceds,

But it was the yellow tufteds that dominated the dawn chorus.

They were the ones that were really present in the dawn chorus around our home.

And that continued for about 15 years, the first 15 years that we lived here.

And then I'm thinking, I haven't seen a yellow tufted honey eater for a couple of days.

And then it became, I haven't seen one for a couple of weeks.

And I'm listening to the dawn chorus, and I'm just not hearing them.

It's like, where have they gone?

What's going on here?

Listening back through my recordings, I've got recordings from September of 2015 when the Yellow Tufteds are in full song.

A whole group of them are there singing in the dawn chorus.

I've got another recording from two months later and they are completely absent.

The only thing that you can hear from honey eaters is a very, very distant white plumed honey eater.