Night Parrot

nanoboy said:
Oh yeah? What do the emails say?
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not a lot, because nothing has been released yet, but apparently the news includes photos as well as feather samples. (And, no, hopefully that's not like what you get with Bigfoot).
 
it could be, but those aren't the names that I have seen mentioned
 
this is big news. rumors of quality images, HR footage and feathers also collected.
 
I saw a bird that sort of looked like a parrot. And it flew over my head at night before I could get my camera out. I collected a feather, but then lost it. :D

Should I really hold my breath?
 
got it now:
IS this an authenticated sighting of a living night parrot, the holy grail of ornithology in Australia?

Fewer than 250 of the plump, greenish and black-feathered birds are thought to survive and evidence of their existence is, well, as rare as parrot's teeth.

Next week, bushman naturalist John Young will present to the world a series of photographs and a 17-second video of a bird he watched for 35 minutes in torchlight. He will say it proves beyond doubt that he has, at last, found the elusive, mysterious night parrot.

The bird, whose habitat is outback Australia, is listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as being endangered.

The most recent sighting of a live one was in 1979 at Coopers Creek in South Australia. In 2006, a headless specimen was found in the Diamantina National Park, a couple of hundred kilometres from Boulia.

Mr Young will unveil the formal evidence and photographs at a function at Queensland Museum next Wednesday. He expects to have his doubters. The 60-year-old, a wildlife filmmaker and a lifelong naturalist with a particular interest in rare birds, has regularly had his work attacked by the scientific establishment, whose main criticism is that his work does not stand up to rigorous scrutiny.

To prove the authenticity of the photographs, Mr Young and his naturalist partner Tom Biggs spoke to various scientists and last week invited an authority on the study of night parrots, Steve Murphy, a senior ecologist for the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Land Management Unit in Kalka in South Australia, to inspect the evidence and give his opinion.

Dr Murphy, who has written extensively on the night parrot and spent years searching unsuccessfully for one, said unequivocally that the bird in the photographs and video was a night parrot.

"Nothing has been as good as this find by John," Dr Murphy said. "We need to establish the full extent of the distribution of this bird which could easily go extinct. In the bird world, this is the holy grail."

Sydney-based wildlife research scientist Rod Kavanagh is another to endorse Mr Young's claim that the bird photographed is the night parrot.

Mr Kavanagh worked for more than 30 years at the NSW government's forest science centre and had a special interest in nocturnal fauna and owls, and is now an ecological consultant.

"I have had the photographs of this bird, a copy of the video and the voice copy of the whistle sent to me for examination and I have no doubt whatever that this is a night parrot," Mr Kavanagh said.

"This is a dramatic find, and I am well aware of its significance. Ask any bird-watcher and this is the bird they all nominate as the one they would most like to see."

Mr Young claimed to have made the find a month ago, but he spent another week in the area where he made the sighting, trying to find the bird's nest or its partner.

Protection measures had to be immediately implemented and the site secured to ensure as much as possible that the bird was not harmed and that the information did not get out, thereby attracting hundreds of interested bird-watchers to the site.

It was the recorded "whistle" of the bird that Mr Young said led to the find.

He said that in 2008 while he was on a search for the night parrot in far southwest Queensland, he heard a whistle just after midnight that he said had to be the sound of a parrot.

"I assumed it was a night parrot and I mimicked the call and two birds responded about 500m from us and came to about 20m but we could not see them because of the high spinifex and the dark night," he said.

He recorded the sound and in April 2009 and June last year succeeded in calling up a parrot but was unable to see it.

"On May 24 this year I moved to a further site and at 6.28pm I put the recording on and got the loudest call from a night parrot I had ever heard," Mr Young said.

"On the 25th we went back to the same place and at 6.38pm a male bird called again. The next night I decided to sit in a clearing. I put my speaker on the ground and played the recordings. Within 15 seconds he came straight up to us, sat behind a tussock calling out for a few minutes and I tried the call again.

"All of a sudden he was right behind us and began whistling and John put the light on and the bird arched its back and fluffed up, and began banging its head on the ground. John lifted the torch up and the parrot calmed and I got my first images.

"For the next 35 minutes or so he remained in the torch light, and whenever it was taken off him, he would begin to run off. It was the most amazing experience."

Although Mr Young will show the images and answer any questions on Wednesday, a museum spokesman said the institution was not providing any endorsement of Mr Young's claims, and its theatre had been hired at commercial rates by a private company.

"None of the scientists at Queensland Museum have seen the pictures or endorsed the research," the spokesman said. "It's a private function."

In 2006, Mr Young provided pictures to Brisbane's Courier Mail of the blue-browed fig-parrot, which he called "the Tasmanian Tiger of the bird world", a discovery initially endorsed by the Queensland government.

Investigations by forensic photographic expert Gale Spring, associate professor in scientific photography at Melbourne's RMIT University and whose professional expertise extended to providing expert evidence in the case of the disappearance of British backpacker Peter Falconio, cast doubt about the authenticity of the photographs, and the Queensland government withdrew its co-operation and endorsement of the claim.

Mr Young said he had made the mistake of not keeping the film negative on that occasion.

"There can be no such criticism this time as there are some 600 frames of the night parrot taken on a high-quality digital camera, and the disk is under lock and key," he said.

"Nobody who has seen these photographs has expressed the slightest doubt about them showing the night parrot."

David Sproule, an experienced photographer and computer and film-editing expert, examined the images, the computer support data and the photographs. He was able to blow the images up on a laptop screen so even one eye or one feather took up the whole screen.

He said that on the evidence he'd been given, the photographs were real.

"They have not been retouched or photo-shopped in any way," Mr Sproule said. "These are definitely photos taken of a colourful parrot at night, I am certain of that.

"Whether or not it is a night parrot is for the experts in that field to decide, but I am convinced absolutely that they are genuine pictures."
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Seems legit to me to.
Holy grail indeed!

What is even more surprising is that Mr. Young and co. seem to have found various sites where the bird seems to occur / range. :)
 
Night parrot seen alive again after 30 years? - Australian Geographic
Birders are twitterpated after naturalist claims he has photos and film of rare parrot not seen alive since 1979.

A LIVE NIGHT PARROT has reportedly been photographed in Western Queensland for the first time since the species was discovered more than 150 years ago.

With a loosely estimated population of less than 250 individuals across central Australia, the last living night parrot specimen was collected in 1912 at Nicol Spring in Western Australia.

The species has since famously avoided detection, save a handful of sightings and two dead specimens, the most recent of which was a decapitated young female picked up by a ranger in Queensland's Diamantina National Park in 2006. Many people thought the species was extinct.

Night parrot photographs and footage

Now Queensland-based naturalist, John Young, plans to present photographs and 17 seconds of footage - which he captured in May - to a group of experts at the Queensland Museum on Wednesday.

"There are some 600 frames of the night parrot taken on a high-quality digital camera, and the disk is under lock and key," John told the Australian newspaper, which printed one of the photos on Saturday. "Nobody who has seen these photographs has expressed the slightest doubt about them showing the night parrot."

“It's fantastic. Lots of people predicted that it would happen, but I'm not sure we actually believed it," Mark Carter a zoologist and bird wildlife guide based in the Northern Territory told Australian Geographic.

Distinguished by its stout frame, short tail and yellow-green plumage, the night parrot (Pezoporus occidentals) is nocturnal and nomadic. It spends much of its time on the ground – a trait it shares with its closest relative and one of just five ground-dwelling parrots in the world, the Australian Eastern Ground Parrot (Pezoporus wallicus).

Dick Smith and the night parrot bounty

In 1989, the search for the enigmatic bird was ramped up when Australian Geographic’s founder and patron, Dick Smith, offered a reward of $25,000 to anyone who could find a night parrot, "dead or alive".

The following year, a dead specimen was picked up by the Australian Museum’s Walter Boles on a roadside near Boulia, western Queensland, just 200km from where the headless specimen was found 16 years later.

While the remote area where John says he photographed the live parrot last month will remain confidential to protect the population, there's a good chance it was found in the same general area as these two specimens. John says the key to his success in luring a night parrot into view was a recording made of some calls in 2008.

"I put my speaker on the ground and played the recordings," he told the Australian. "Within 15 seconds he came straight up to us... For the next 35 minutes or so he remained in the torch light, and whenever it was taken off him, he would begin to run off. It was the most amazing experience."

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

While the discovery has been met with much excitement, many experts remain cautious until more photographs and the video footage are revealed next week.

In 2006, John claimed to have taken a photograph of the blue-browed fig-parrot, a native species that was considered extinct. His image was later disputed by forensic photographic expert, Gale Spring, and no independent expert would confirm its authenticity.

This time, however, John has rallied expert opinion to back up his claim – including Steve Murphy, a senior ecologist for the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Land Management Unit in Kalka in South Australia and Sydney-based wildlife researcher, Rod Kavanagh.

"Because of the history of the guy who found it, people are a little more sceptical than if someone else had. But it looks like he's come through with the goods," Mark told Australian Geographic.

Living and breeding in central Australia

"It looks like a night parrot, it's very exciting. We'll see more on Wednesday. If it can be verified in some way, it would hopefully be a key to unlocking a lot of the biology of the bird,” says Dr Leo Joseph, director of the CSIRO Australian National Wildlife Collection in Canberra. “Just finding them has been the problem. The research has been so dominated by the specimens from the 19th century that it's hard to proceed with rational conservation and management."

"There's no reason why it isn't [real]. I've seen enough skins of the night parrot to know," agrees Dr Les Christidis, an ornithologist at Southern Cross University, NSW, who examined the 2006 specimen with Walter Boles. "It's nice to have a bird that was thought to be extinct, and now we actually have photographs of live one."

If it is confirmed that these birds are living and breeding, researchers hope to gain a better understanding of their habitat, and the threats they face. Nevertheless, catching one to observe in captivity would be a mistake, Les says. "Parrots tend to pair bond, some pair for life, so if you caught one, you'd probably be destroying a pair. It's best to leave well enough alone."
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If it hung around for 35 minutes - why does he only have 17 seconds of video?

:p

Hix
 
Hix said:
If it hung around for 35 minutes - why does he only have 17 seconds of video?
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a valid question indeed! I hadn't actually thought about that. I guess we will have to wait for an answer for that one, but one possibility is that he is only going to show 17 seconds at the announcement rather than that being all he has. Still, if there was time to take 600 photos there should have also been time to take more video footage. Video should be more valuable in a way than the photos because it would be harder to fake (by which I mean photos can be staged fairly easily, but footage of a parrot running about obviously alive is a little harder to pull off convincingly).
 
I am not too surprised it has been rediscovered. A nocturnal bird like this must be pretty safe from the attentions of Man- one of the most usual and most effective causes of Extinction- while otherwise being very difficult to find or see, hence explaining why it is so elusive over long periods of time. I am not sure why it should be thought to be extinct- what causes were suggested?
 
Chlidonias said:
a valid question indeed! I hadn't actually thought about that. I guess we will have to wait for an answer for that one, but one possibility is that he is only going to show 17 seconds at the announcement rather than that being all he has.
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Suggestion -its possible that during that time the bird just repeated the same actions- scuttling into and out of the light, or whatever. Maybe it just sat there otherwise- so that 17 seconds is all they could splice together of it actually moving.(?)
 
Pertinax said:
I am not too surprised it has been rediscovered. A nocturnal bird like this must be pretty safe from the attentions of Man- one of the most usual and most effective causes of Extinction- while otherwise being very difficult to find or see, hence explaining why it is so elusive over long periods of time. I am not sure why it should be thought to be extinct- what causes were suggested?
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some of that was covered earlier in the thread. A lot of the inland Australian birds and small mammals which are now rare or completely extinct weren't directly impacted by man at all, but rather by livestock and introduced predators (foxes and cats). A small ground-dwelling parrot would be easy prey for both those predators.
 
Hix said:
If it hung around for 35 minutes - why does he only have 17 seconds of video?
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If you ever tried to photograph a small wild animal in torchlight, you would know that ;)

Exciting is also that the call was recorded, so it may be possible to find new birds more easily.
 
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