Night Parrot

FBBird said:
Interesting that Hooded and Golden-shouldered, with similar habits, both managed to hang on.
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Both these species are found in more remote, and historically less developed areas. Hoodeds seem to be secure but are largely confined to protected areas. The golden-shouldered parrot is endangered and it's survival in by no means secure.
 
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Pertinax said:
What is the case for the Paradise parrot/parakeet being a natural hybrid from two closely related species? (e.g. hooded and golden shouldered?) Do the ranges not overlap?
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While they live/did live in similar habitats, their historical ranges do not overlap as far as I am aware.
 
Pertinax said:
What is the case for the Paradise parrot/parakeet being a natural hybrid from two closely related species? (e.g. hooded and golden shouldered?) Do the ranges not overlap?
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No chance. The range of the paradise parrot was about 1000 km south of the golden-shouldered parrot, while the golden shouldered and the hooded parrots are separated by the 600 km wide Gulf of Carpentaria. (That is 600 and 360 miles for those still back in the dark ages).

Some breeders used to cross, I think, hooded and red-rump parrots (it might have been mulga parrots), the male offspring of which looked a lot like a paradise parrot, to sell to the gullible. Females however did not.
 
Recent article in Smithsonian Magazine about the night parrot:

Rare and Elusive Australian Bird, Once Thought Extinct for 100 Years, Discovered by Indigenous Rangers and Scientists | Smithsonian
It wasn’t until 2013 that a naturalist found a small, living population in southwestern Queensland. Since then, the species’s known population has been in the tens of birds, and the night parrot remains one of the most elusive—and most endangered—birds on Earth.

Now, however, a team of Indigenous rangers and scientists has discovered as many as 50 night parrots on land managed by the Ngururrpa people in Western Australia’s Great Sandy Desert. The new results from their project, which is supported by the Indigenous Desert Alliance with funding from the Australian National Environmental Science Program’s Resilient Landscapes Hub, were published in the journal Wildlife Research on Monday.
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It turns out dingoes might be inadvertently protecting the night parrot population by hunting feral cats, who are the parrot's main predators.
This makes the Ngururrpa Indigenous Protected Area population the largest known congregation of night parrots, since the known population in Queensland contains no more than 20 birds, per the Guardian.

Having identified the night parrots by sound, the team moved on to studying threats to the endangered species using camera traps. They found that dingoes were the most present predators in the area—but the large, wild dogs were busy eating feral cats, which the team suspects are the real key predators of night parrots. So dingoes, they suggest, are actually protecting the night parrot population.
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And as others speculated earlier in the thread, the night parrot also benefits from the lack of industrial development in its territory.
Satellite imagery helped determine that lightning-caused bushfires pose a great threat to the parrots in the Great Sandy Desert. The rangers already conduct strategic land burning to manage that risk, but the new data could help them tailor their plan to protect roosting sites. Night parrots also benefit from a lack of human development in their environment, so the team argues remote habitats should be kept unindustrialized.

In fact, the Great Sandy Desert “is probably one of the world’s most uninfluenced ecosystems when it comes to industrial-level footprints,” James Watson, a biogeographer at the University of Queensland who was not involved in the study, tells the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Peter de Kruijff.
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MRJ said:
Some breeders used to cross, I think, hooded and red-rump parrots (it might have been mulga parrots), the male offspring of which looked a lot like a paradise parrot, to sell to the gullible. Females however did not.
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Pulcherrimus isn't a natural species and indeed some private breeders did try to cross golden-shouldered with mulga to get similar looking birds, but as MRJ explained the females didn't resemble pulcherrimus at all. An interesting person in the whole story of the so-called ant-hill parrots is Joe Mattinson, who looked for paradise all his life, but also established golden-shouldered in captivity. He might also be responsible for introducing the species to European aviculture (and Horned parakeets as well when he was not allowed to send his caught birds to Australia from New Caledonia, although French breeders play a role here as well).
 
DDcorvus said:
Pulcherrimus isn't a natural species and indeed some private breeders did try to cross golden-shouldered with mulga to get similar looking birds, but as MRJ explained the females didn't resemble pulcherrimus at all.
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Given the fact that the post you replied to established there is no chance the Paradise Parrot was merely a hybrid population, I would be interested to hear what your source is for the claim that it nonetheless wasn't a true species?
 
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