Conservationists are celebrating the birth of three rare honeyeater chicks as the result of a potentially species-saving breeding program.
Captive-born regent honeyeaters have successfully bred with birds in the wild to produce the babies, conservation program co-ordinators revealed on Friday.
With only between 250 and 300 of the rare songbirds estimated to remain in the wild, every successful breeding event is critical for the endangered species.
Sydney's Taronga Zoo, which runs the breeding program, released two female regent honeyeaters into the Tomalpin woodlands in the NSW Hunter Valley in October 2021.
Since then, one of the females flew more than 134km west to Capertee National Park, northeast of Bathurst, where she and a wild male produced two fledglings in spring.
The other female was spotted with a wild-born partner in the upper Hunter region late in 2023 having previously hatched a wild chick with a fellow captive-bred partner.
The pair were the first known zoo-bred regent honeyeaters to successfully reproduce in the wild in NSW.
BirdLife Australia's regent honeyeater recovery co-ordinator Mick Roderick said the two new fathers might have otherwise gone unpaired as there were more males than females of the species in the wild.
"These are the exact results we are after in the zoo-bred release program," he said.
"To see three zoo-bred females paired with wild males this spring, from two separate releases in the Tomalpin woodlands is just so incredibly pleasing, especially when one of them successfully fledged two chicks."
In November, the zoo released a further 14 captive-bred birds in the Blue Mountains to coincide with the spring breeding season, hoping to further bolster wild populations.
There has been a total of 140 zoo-bred birds released across NSW under the program to date.
The breeding scheme is a partnership between the NSW's government's Saving our Species program, Taronga Conservation Society Australia and BirdLife Australia.
