What happens to a species if the music starts to die, or when their songs become corrupted or their singers have never heard the original tunes? A new study has found that a loss of melody and song could be a bad sign for one of Australia’s rarest songbirds – the regent honeyeater. Once seen in flocks of hundreds across south-eastern Australia, there are now thought to be only a few hundred of the songbirds left in the wild. The birds are known to imitate the songs of other species, such as friarbirds, currawongs and cuckooshrikes, but there was no clear theory for why they did it. The study has found that this mimicry might not be a male’s show of skill that would be attractive to a female, but could instead be a symptom of a “loss of vocal culture” that could make it harder for the birds to find a mate. Populations have reached such low numbers that young males are not getting a chance to learn mating calls from other adults, according to Dr Ross Crates, an ecologist at the Fenner school of environment and society at the Australian National University. “The poor birds are not getting the chance to to learn what they should be singing,” Crates said. When regent honeyeaters emerge as chicks, the males stay relatively quiet to avoid attracting attention to their newborn. This means it is not until later that the juveniles learn the mating songs from adult males. But if there aren’t enough of those around, according to Crates, then they will just pick up the calls of other birds. And those calls are not what female regent honeyeaters are listening out for. Crates’ study, in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that these birds that don’t learn to sing their usual song are less likely to find a partner. Dean Ingwersen is the woodland bird program leader at BirdLife Australia and also coordinates a national recovery program for the regent honeyeater. He said the regent honeyeater’s talent for imitation was always considered to be a deliberate ploy, with “one working theory” that they mimicked other birds to blend in “so that maybe they didn’t get their heads beaten in as much”. For the study, researchers recorded birds in the wild and in captivity, and analysed recordings going back to 1986. Ingwersen, who is a co-author of the study, said over time the complexity of the songs appeared to be diminishing. Crates and his colleagues are putting their discovery to the test at captive breeding programs run by Taronga Conservation Society. For years, juveniles have been played recordings of regent honeyeater calls from speakers inside their aviaries. The team have now placed two wild-caught adults in neighbouring aviaries to see if this can also help the young males to learn the right song before they’re released into the wild. Michael Shiels, the supervisor of the bird department at the conservation society, said keepers would try anything to give the birds the best chance of thriving when they’re released. “Could those birds have done better if they had sang better? Possibly,” he said. “The breeding program has been pretty successful but it can’t hurt to make sure we’re doing the right thing.” Guardian Australia’s Bird of the Year poll will kick off on 27 September.