a night parrot was reported in north-west Victoria this March. To quote from a post on the Australian bird email group: "The lucky observer is an office-holder with Birdlife Australia and boasts over 30 years experience in the field. However, don't get too excited: this report is now many weeks old, and follow-up trips to locate the bird (which included Leo Joseph from the National Night Parrot Network) have been unsuccessful." There is apparently going to be an article about it in the Age today (?), but in the meantime here is another bloggish article about it (short on detail of the sighting but including mention of previous sightings): Night Parrot Dreaming | Northwest Victoria, Australia | bird-o
and here's an earlier article (because I know the mention in the above post about London Zoo will interest people): Search for the elusive and engimatic Night Parrot | bird-o
Thanks Chlidonias, this is good news. Unfortunately it seems that no real structural research is being done on it and that everything around it is more ad-hoc. Although I understand that doing anything structural with a very rare nomadic species whose habits we barely understand is extremely difficult.
Are we sure that the bird exists at all? Can't they simply be a few vagrant Ground Parrots from further south? It seems hard to believe that a nocturnal parrot, living in some of the most sparsely populated places on earth, that was not hunted mercilessly by man, is so rare/extinct in a region that it supposedly evolved to live in.
Not being hunted mercilessly by man doesn't mean not being hunted at all. I suspect that cats and foxes would be rife in those areas and a small nocturnal reluctant to fly bird would be excellent prey for them.
did you read the articles? There was a road-killed specimen found in 1990 and a juvenile found dead in 2006. These are demonstrably genuine night parrots, now in museum collections, not vague rumours of sightings. Apart for the introduced predators such as foxes and cats mentioned by jay, there are also the introduced ungulates which destroy/modify the habitat. There are several now-rare Australian arid-country birds affected in the same way.
Yeah I read the articles, and have read articles about them before. I find it easier to believe in Bigfoot though. Fair points about predation and habitat destruction - if their numbers are directly proportional to rainfall, then now is a good time to go search for them. It would be awesome if they found a population. (One of the articles commented that pictures are not needed, but pull out your mobile phone to record their call. I hope that was a tongue-in-cheek statement, because I would hate to think that these explorers would go on an expedition without proper A/V equipment! )
If you go back to the old reports on the night parrot it seems it always have been rare. There is a reason only 24 skins of it exist (out of which 2 were only collected since 1990). I have seen more Kakapo skins in one single museum (to talk about another night dwelling parrot). Most of those got collected by one person in a wet period. So I put my question marks on the descriptions that it used to be a common bird. Like Jay and Chlidonias wrote before it is probably hunted by foxes and cats and the few we know about its nesting behaviour makes them even more vulnerable for predation and habitat modification. So we have a rare bird that became rarer (probably). That is nocturnal and nomadic. Finding a population will be challenging the least. These two things also make the recommendation of recording the call logical. How are you going to take a proper photo of a small nocturnal parrot? You or need to catch it (which is illigal) or you need to be extremely lucky (flush it during the day or have very good equipment so you can take a good picture of a small bird when there is a limited amount of light). Recording the call will be a lot easier. This is actually also the way they search for groundparrots.
Oh I agree with recording their call - I was joking around because the article said to use your mobile phone to record the call. Hence my comment that I hope that naturalists searching for the parrot would have slightly better audio recording equipment than a mobile phone.
the article in The Age has now been published (it got held up a couple of days), and I have to say the sighting is very far from case-closing! Is there life yet in these ex-parrots?
Now doesn't that sound like a sighting of Bigfoot? "....knew immediately it was something he had never seen before. Then, he said, he started to shake. "It takes a lot to get me to shake, and my eyes were actually watering as well, according to my wife," he said. "This thing came over and in a split second, I was like, really? "My words to my wife were, what the bloody hell was that - which was a metaphorical expression; I had a bloody good idea what it was. I just didn't believe it." .......Mr Tzaros admitted the inconclusive nature of the sighting nagged at him. "There will always be that element of doubt," he said. "But I'm still very confident what I saw..."
Unfortunately I have to admit you are right The less than perfect is quite an understatement. From that angle during dusk no way that he could have seen any colours or markings. This sighting could have literarly been a fat budgie.
However. Chris Tzaros is good. Very good. So there's a point there. I hope the recent conditions inland spur a population explosion for Night Parrots (as it has for Painted Snipes), and hopefully some Field Ecologists get some more conclusive proof (water-hole camera trap, feathers, mist nets, all that).
Oh, I hope exactly the opposite - any future sightings will be published immediately and birdwatchers encouraged to visit and help finding the birds. Would any parrot be actually found, there is always the possibility to organize or restrict the access later. Otherwise, few governmental naturalists simply lack the manpower to search the area effectively. Otherwise, the only hope to break the 50 years impasse is some new recent technology - camera traps, DNA traps or something else I didn't think about.
That name sounded familiar, so I checked this quarter's issue of Zoos Victoria's 'Friends of The Zoo', and there is a pic of an orange-bellied parrot credited to him. Who is he?
He's a conservation manager with Birdlife Australia (formally Birds Australia). He helped me with some work a couple of years ago. Very level-headed, hard-working, nice and credible bird expert.
It was a common bird with a very restricted range which has been extensively searched since, so the fact none have been seen since September 1927 is certainly suggestive that it is indeed extinct.
Sporadic reports from remote Queensland still occur every few years, or so I've heard. But given it's association with termite mounds, it is very likely extinct since its distribution would be constrained by the distribution of termites.
for those who follow the Birding-Aus email group, there is a rumour of some very exciting news to be released at the end of June.....watch this space!
