Over the last 12 days a single Regent Honeyeater has been observed by many watchers on the fringes of Canberra’s ‘inner north’. As one commented to me ‘ it has brought a lot of joy to birdos during this terrible time of fire and drought and now hail storm’. The weight of expert opinion is that it is a female. While the ‘bare patch’ might be described as small it has a very thick crop of what I would call ‘tubercles’ (cf HANZAB ‘nodules’ and Gould ‘warty excrescences’). These appear, at the margin, to be growing up through the bristly feather growth – hence very little visible true ‘bare skin’. There are more and smaller tubercles visible on the right side (about 50) than the left (about 40). (I remember an Australian Nobel prize-winner saying ‘All science is counting’. In view of my information offered here you might be inclined to add ‘but not all counting is science’. Perhaps not.) Photos in the BLA Gallery show the many different kinds of ‘bare patch’ you might find in this species. This one appears quite close to the specimens shown in the Gould lithograph. (Below – snip from original available on NLA website).
