May 26, 2026 · 22 min · 9 segments
Honeyeaters don’t just sing at dawn - they listen. In our 150th episode, Andrew Skeoch returns to share what he’s learnt about honeyeater songs, and how they reveal something deeper about birds, place…
Andrew SkeochGuestKirsty CostaHost
Going back to when I was first recording, and I'd be traveling around the country making sound recordings, and I, I just assumed that being a nature recordist, you have to get up in the morning to record the dawn chorus.
It's just part of the, part of the gig, you know? I'd be spending a lot of time recording dawn choruses.
And, well, well, one of the things that I loved was the aesthetics of the honeyeater dawn chorus because they ...
And when you get a group of them all sort of roosting collectively within earshot of each other, you get this ...
You know, when I first started traveling overseas, I realized this is a really uniquely Australian thing.
You don't get this kind of sonic patterning in, uh, dawn choruses in, say, Asia or, or Europe.
And I also realized that that patterning aesthetically, pleasingly to the ear, works because wherever I was in the country, it seemed to be one species that was doing the calling, and hence you'd get this one species doing its simple dawn song, and you'd get this bouncing of, of sound in the landscape.
It took me a while f- for me to sort of pick up on that and confirm that, you know, I think this is a common thing.
And I sort of realized that there's a refinement to that, which is that it's not just one species of honeyeater that you hear in the dawn chorus.
So what I realized is that honeyeaters come in these various sizes, uh, that you get, uh, the smaller melithreptes honeyeaters around the country, um, white napes and black chins and brown-headeds and so on.
Then you get the lichnostomus honeyeaters, which are the mid-sized green species like the white plumes, uh, and then larger ones, the wattlebirds, the friarbirds.
Um, there's also the, um, new hollands and white-cheeked honeyeaters, which are in a separate genus, and the white-fronted honeyeaters.
And what I realized is that in the dawn chorus, you tend to get one of those genuses singing in any one place.
Even though there might be multiple examples of the, say, the lichnostomus honeyeaters in the landscape, it tends to be one that you hear.
Going back to when I was first recording, and I'd be traveling around the country making sound recordings, and I, I just assumed that being a nature recordist, you have to get up in the morning to record the dawn chorus.
It's just part of the, part of the gig, you know? I'd be spending a lot of time recording dawn choruses.
And, well, well, one of the things that I loved was the aesthetics of the honeyeater dawn chorus because they ...
And when you get a group of them all sort of roosting collectively within earshot of each other, you get this ...
You know, when I first started traveling overseas, I realized this is a really uniquely Australian thing.
You don't get this kind of sonic patterning in, uh, dawn choruses in, say, Asia or, or Europe.
And I also realized that that patterning aesthetically, pleasingly to the ear, works because wherever I was in the country, it seemed to be one species that was doing the calling, and hence you'd get this one species doing its simple dawn song, and you'd get this bouncing of, of sound in the landscape.
It took me a while f- for me to sort of pick up on that and confirm that, you know, I think this is a common thing.
And I sort of realized that there's a refinement to that, which is that it's not just one species of honeyeater that you hear in the dawn chorus.
So what I realized is that honeyeaters come in these various sizes, uh, that you get, uh, the smaller melithreptes honeyeaters around the country, um, white napes and black chins and brown-headeds and so on.
Then you get the lichnostomus honeyeaters, which are the mid-sized green species like the white plumes, uh, and then larger ones, the wattlebirds, the friarbirds.
Um, there's also the, um, new hollands and white-cheeked honeyeaters, which are in a separate genus, and the white-fronted honeyeaters.
And what I realized is that in the dawn chorus, you tend to get one of those genuses singing in any one place.
Even though there might be multiple examples of the, say, the lichnostomus honeyeaters in the landscape, it tends to be one that you hear.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
