An Australian bird, the regent honeyeater, is at more risk of extinction than the giant panda or the Sumatran rhino according to a top environment researcher.
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Once abundant across southeastern Australian, including Victorian and New South Wales, more generous estimates put the wild population at as low as 350 birds.
ANU's Bird Research Group's lead researcher Ross Crates said the longer they left the birds to fend for themselves, the harder it would be to fix.
"The message really is if we're going to save the species, we need to do it now," Mr Crates said.
Australians could help by planting more trees, protecting existing nests, funding the ANU's Bird Research Group and reporting any sightings of the bird in the wild to Birdlife Australia.
Mr Crates said massive habitat loss was the main culprit with eucalyptus trees cleared for agricultural use in post-war Australia.
"Regent honeyeaters were once one of the most common birds in suburban Melbourne and Sydney."
Mr Crates said while there were populations bred in captivity, it was important to save the wild population so captive honeyeaters could learn from wild honeyeaters how to survive in the bush.
"If we breed them in captivity we can't expect anything different than the same decline again unless we fix the problems," Mr Crates said.
"The ones left in the wild are the survivors."
Regent honeyeaters flourished in large flocks but, in over two years of research, Mr Crates and his colleagues struggled to find large groups of the bird.
"There are no large flocks left," Mr Crates said.
Without safety in numbers, the birds struggled to compete with other types of honeyeaters or parakeets
"We can artificially increase the flock size of wild birds. We can also release more females than males," Mr Crates said.
He said wild flocks had a biased sex ratio with almost no females left in the wild, so it would be important to release more captive females than males into the small wild flocks.
Regent honeyeaters also learned their songs from each other and if flocks died, songs would too.
"Reduced flock numbers mean we get a situation where the regent honeyeaters don't know what they should be singing," Mr Crates said.
"They sometimes end up learning the songs of other species, which essentially means they may not be able to communicate with each other properly."
ANU was planning to implement some nest protection measures and there was a recent release of captive regent honeyeaters at Taronga Zoo.
