There was a hilarious sketch in the Monty Python television series, The Boss remembers, where John Cleese returned what appeared to be a dead parrot to a pet store, banging it on the counter and complaining to the store owner that he’d sold him an expired parrot.
“It’s an ex-parrot,” Cleese screamed in indignation.
The Boss was always reminded of it when he heard anything about Australia’s elusive night parrot, which went missing for more than a century, presumed extinct. The genuine ex-parrot.
It was once found throughout Australia’s arid inland but numbers plummeted in the late 19th century, when feral cats, land clearing and grazing devastated the populations of the ground-dwelling birds.
Then, to everyone’s surprise, a dead night parrot was found near Boulia in outback Queensland in 1990, 21 years after the dead parrot sketch appeared. It spurred efforts to find more - and another dead bird was discovered in the Diamantina National Park in 2006. Finally, only in 2013 was a small live population found, in south-west Queensland, by naturalist John Young.
Well, the big news for twitchers this week is that a more substantial group of night parrots – an estimated 50 or so – has been found in the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia.
A team of scientists and indigenous rangers has been monitoring the birds in the Ngururrpa Protected Area, using acoustic recorders they called “songmeters.”
The researchers eventually isolated about 20 roosting sites where they heard the distinctive night parrot calls, mostly an hour after sunset and the hour before sunrise.
Listed as critically endangered, the night parrots are notoriously hard to locate, since they live in tunnels burrowed into dense spinifex where they hide during the day, only emerging to forage for seeds at night.
And given the vast areas of dunefields and sandplains in this enormous desert, the researchers did well to locate the sites – aided by the rangers’ detailed knowledge of habitats, water and seed resources. They combined these with geology maps, satellite imagery and fire history data to select the sites where they placed the songmeters. The work has been going on since 2018.
Once they located the birds, the researchers turned their minds to the threats to the bird populations – mainly predators like feral cats, and bush fires sparked by lightning.
The cameras they placed around the sites showed ten times more dingoes than feral cats, and the dingoes’ scats showed they had a healthy appetite for the cats and they believe the dingoes are helping to suppress the cat numbers, thus assisting the parrot populations.
They also analysed 40 years of satellite imagery to assess the danger of fires to the birds’ nesting sites. Because of the vegetation types and flammability of the surrounding landscapes, they say bushfires are a much greater danger in the Great Sandy Desert than in Queensland.
Strategic aerial and ground burning is already occurring - and they are hopeful these cooler burns can be targeted to protect the night parrots’ breeding areas. Let’s hope they can hang on. Woof!