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Night Parrot

Discussion in 'Wildlife & Nature Conservation' started by Chlidonias, 2 Jun 2012.

  1. DDcorvus

    DDcorvus Well-Known Member 15+ year member

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    OMG that this comes out while I was wasting my time on searching for some Spanish cat!!!! In my book this is the discouvery of the century!!!! It seems Mr Young convinced the experts present, although taking into account his previous actions I would love to see the evidence and make my own conclusions.
    And a conservation plan is ready and approved, only up to know no one has ever bothered to implement it. It would need some updating and I would love to get some community work included into it. All accounts I have read seem to point to a nomadic species so protecting the species will be challenging. I hope Australia has some very ambitious phd candidates and some people crazy enough to start working on the species.
     
  2. Chlidonias

    Chlidonias Moderator Staff Member 15+ year member

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    I've just been listening to an interview with Sean Dooley who was at the reveal, and it does seem like the evidence was incontrovertible and everybody there was in no doubt it was genuine.

    Regarding the non-release of the recorded call discussed earlier in this thread, Sean said that John Young is not going to release the recording to anybody (including conservation bodies) for at least the next few years. Which, as I said, is not an action I agree with at all.
     
  3. nanoboy

    nanoboy Well-Known Member

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    You used the word "genuine", and some articles referred to his evidence of the blue fig parrot being debunked. So what's the deal with this guy? Does he have a reputation for faking 'evidence' of seeing rare birds?
     
  4. Chlidonias

    Chlidonias Moderator Staff Member 15+ year member

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    google John Young and fig parrot and you'll come up with some interesting stuff. It is a bit convoluted, but basically he claimed that he had discovered a new species of fig parrot in northern Queensland. Apparently (according to John Young) the species was different in every conceivable way from double-eyed fig parrots (which is the species that occurs in Queensland) and he had all the proof but he wasn't going to release any of it. But then he produced a photo he had taken of one in the wild, which photo specialists determined (or at least very heavily suspected) was a retouched photo of a red-browed fig parrot (the red on the face having been overlaid with blue). A scientific paper describing the new species never eventuated.

    Wikipedia article outlining it:
    Blue-fronted Fig Parrot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
     
  5. DDcorvus

    DDcorvus Well-Known Member 15+ year member

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    That you do not release the call to the general public ok, fine. But at least give it to some experts to make their work a bit easier. If you are serious about caring for the species you facilitate any actions. A population survey is needed asap. Withholding crucial information is selfish and stupid.
     
  6. nanoboy

    nanoboy Well-Known Member

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    Fascinating story. So, if his night parrot evidence is accepted as being real, then one does wonder if he was telling the truth about the blue fronted fig parrot. Paradise parrots may be next on his list.
     
  7. DDcorvus

    DDcorvus Well-Known Member 15+ year member

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    He has admitted that he made mistakes in the past. The fig parrot still stands as an hoax. And Paradise parrots are not extinct. The claim they are is a governmental conspiracy to prevent Australian citizens of enjoying their most beautiful parrot species :p
     
  8. Chlidonias

    Chlidonias Moderator Staff Member 15+ year member

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    some interesting observations in this article:
    sunshinecoastbirds: John Young and the Night Parrot
     
  9. Chlidonias

    Chlidonias Moderator Staff Member 15+ year member

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    some stinky news coming out about the night parrot photos. Apparently many parts of the bird in the photos have been digitally cloned onto other parts. There are various possible reasons for that of course, but all of which make the photos worthless. The obvious reason, given the history of John Young, and as much as I wished and thought this was genuine...the photos are fake.

    See the Birdforum thread discussing it (I have linked to the page where the discussion about cloning starts): BirdForum

    A quote (post #573) to get things started:
     
  10. DDcorvus

    DDcorvus Well-Known Member 15+ year member

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    That would be such a shame, but at the same time there are still the feathers itself or are there questions on their origin as well?
     
  11. Chlidonias

    Chlidonias Moderator Staff Member 15+ year member

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    As I understand the feathers are confirmed as being night parrot feathers but that doesn't mean they came from a living bird. I don't know if anyone has even seen the feathers or if there is only John Young's word of their existence (I'd have to go back through the articles and see if anyone official has actually said "yes, we saw these feathers and determined they are night parrot feathers").

    The only photos anybody has seen are of the bird in basically the same pose, always from the same side (hence some commentators saying they will believe it when they see the other side of the bird). Some possibilities for the digital cloning are right-out fake; to "tidy up" a bedraggled bird; or to hide that the bird is actually being held in the hand (i.e. cloning out the hand and smoothing the feathers, etc). Even if not fake, altering the photos makes them worthless as it calls into question his whole story (which is full of holes as it is! See the last article I posted with the bolded bits).

    The video is suspiciously short (as Hix commented on at the time, earlier in this thread) and as someone on Birdforum said, it would be easier to fake a hopping bird on video than a running bird. (As people may recall, there was some interest in that the video showed it hopping rather than running as night parrots have been recorded doing in the past).

    Then there's all the cloak-and-dagger stuff that John Young endulges in, which doesn't help his case!

    Personally, since this news came out I have fallen squarely into the "fake" camp. What is interesting is on the Australian birding forum everybody is very strongly pro-John Young and anyone making dissenting comments is abused and shouted out. Apparently there's no room for opinion there!
     
  12. DDcorvus

    DDcorvus Well-Known Member 15+ year member

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    I was informed that someone in Western Australia recorded the call as well and that this person was willing to share it with the authorities. And I agree with you that John Young is not making it easy for us to believe him. I have similar doubts as you, but I have some wish-full thinking as well. I'm surprised that the Australian birders are defending him. The birders I spoke all told me that they would only believe his story if they showed them a life night parrot.
     
  13. Pertinax

    Pertinax Well-Known Member 15+ year member

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    I would be instantly suspicious of anyone who was proved to have indulged in any form of ornithological hoax in the past- if that is in fact what it was proven to be? It indicates untruthfulness and a desire or preparedness to mislead- for whatever purpose- and to me, makes any later claims less credible as a result.
     
  14. IanRRobinson

    IanRRobinson Well-Known Member

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    I have no axe to grind, and I don't know anything about the present episode. But I find it very hard to understand somebody who claims to have rediscovered a species and won't tell all to responsible wildlife conservation professionals.

    That line
    could only have come from an Aussie and it tells it exactly like it is. I'd be very pleased to be proved wrong, but it looks as if we've been had.
     
    Last edited: 11 Oct 2013
  15. dean

    dean Well-Known Member 10+ year member

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    I watched a programme on sky a while back it concerned some one looking for night parrots if i remember correctly it involved a water trough for cattle/sheep I came in halfway through so didn,t get much of the back story, but the chap was looking for nest sites in tufts of grass. he was convinced the bird was out there I don't recall his name though, i think he was elderly with glasses possibly a mustache , but I may have miss remembered this.
    I can understand not releasing the call we have had press coverage lately that complained people using a bird call Ap are having a detrimental effect on breeding birds, either stopping them feeding chicks by looking for the interloper, or coming off eggs for the same reason.
     
  16. Chlidonias

    Chlidonias Moderator Staff Member 15+ year member

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    eight months on from the news above (about the publicly-released photos of the bird being seriously altered digitally) I have revisited the subject. Apparently the photos which were altered were done so to smooth out feathers and remove a twig across the bird, because these were the photos which were to be published. Other photos do show the unaltered bird (with twig) -- although none of these have been released to viewers at large (but have been seen by numerous individual people).

    The video which was initially described as simply showing a bird hopping also apparently shows much more than that. To quote from the Birdforum thread I linked to earlier (written by an Australian birder I would trust to be 100% honest):
    So, for myself, I started out believing (or at least wanting to believe) but then went straight to "almost certainly fake" when the news came out about the photoshopping. Now I am back to being a believer. I still am firmly opposed to all the cloak-and-dagger secrecy and his unwillingness to co-operate with anyone though, with him obviously believing that only he knows anything about safe-guarding the species.
     
  17. DDcorvus

    DDcorvus Well-Known Member 15+ year member

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    I went through a similar process Chlidonias and I am still hoping more information will be released to the wider public. To be fair if it takes a bush expert like Mr Young so long to find the bird then even if we have the call and location of the bird it will be very challenging for most of us (even for those that are bird experts and used to travel in rough terrain) to actually find the species.

    Also I hope he will start cooperating with the right people in safe-guarding the species. Does anyone know what happened to the alleged recording of the night parrot in Western Australia, which was reported some months after the event of Mr Young?
     
  18. nanoboy

    nanoboy Well-Known Member

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    Two updates:

    John Young will be giving a talk very soon in Melbourne and will show new photos and video (the only existing video of a live Night Parrot). To buy tickets and read more, see here: John Young: Rediscovering the Night Parrot ? Chris Watson

    Secondly, a feral cat killed a Night Parrot recently from the same population that John Young discovered: Cookies must be enabled. | The Australian

    "Night parrot falls prey to feral cat
    MARIE HOGG
    THE AUSTRALIAN
    FEBRUARY 18, 2015 12:00AM
    AN Australian night parrot, one of the world’s rarest birds, has been killed in southwest Queensland by a feral cat, prompting calls for government intervention to better manage the tiny population.

    There have only been a handful of sightings of the colourful bird over the past century but birdwatcher and naturalist Greg Roberts said last night the death was “a serious development”.

    “The Queensland government has a legal obligation to protect endangered wildlife, but they’ve done nothing to try and involve itself in doing something to get a proper management regime in place,” he said.

    Mr Roberts said the privately owned land where the bird was killed should be declared a *national park.

    Bushman and naturalist John Young discovered the small population of night parrots in 2013, photographing a bird for the first time in a feat revealed by The Australian. Mr Roberts confirmed the dead bird was one of this colony.


    “We have confirmed beyond doubt that a night parrot was killed by a feral cat, one of the very small populations discovered by John Young recently,” he said.

    “As a result of that, sharpshooters have been hired, and have moved into the property.”

    Since his original discovery, Mr Young and scientist Stephen Murphy have continued research in the region, finding the parrot at several other locations.

    The enigmatic night parrot bounces along the ground, puffs itself up to display its green and gold plumage and bangs its head on the ground when excited.
     
  19. boof

    boof Well-Known Member 15+ year member

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    theres also a possible sighting from a week or two ago from an area in Northern Territorycalled Kiama creek.
     
  20. nanoboy

    nanoboy Well-Known Member

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    Oh yes, I forgot about that one. I had a look on Google Maps and that is the definition of 'the middle of nowhere'.