TRIAL BY FIRE

On a late spring morning in October, in a spotted gumironbark forest he describes as “dry as toast,” BirdLife Australia’s Mick Roderick and I are on the lookout for Regent Honeyeaters. While the area we walk has thus far avoided total ruin from cataclysmic bushfires, the tinder-dry leaves beneath our boots send the clear and crackling message: This could all go up in a flash, and with it the future of one of the country’s most iconic woodland birds.

We met earlier near a billboard that features a worn, discolored map offering these grounds as investment property. But the real value, Roderick says, is found in the diverse ecosystem that has built up over millennia in this 3.4-square-mile remnant of Lower Hunter Valley woodland in eastern Australia. Away from the main road, the forest is full of birds—a flock of White-browed Woodswallows veering over the treetops, a pair of Black-chinned Honeyeaters knifing through the leaves, the steady whistles of Little Lorikeets. But a Regent Honeyeater? This most charismatic of Australia’s woodland birds, with black chainmail-like patterns on its breast and long lemon-yellow tail feathers, is an exceedingly rare sight.

The steady loss, degradation, and fragmentation of the Regent’s habitat over the past century have pushed this brilliantly colored bird to the edge of extinction. But it’s fire, intensified by ever hotter temperatures and ever lower rainfall, that unnerves Roderick most. “Every summer comes around and I’m like, ‘Oh god, here we go again,’” he says. “If all the unburnt patches go up, then we’ll essentially be writing off the honeyeater’s habitat.” And, though he doesn’t say it, the bird itself.

Roderick and his collaborators, including a local Aboriginal community, have made a remarkable