Night Parrot

Chlidonias said:
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.
Click to expand...

True, true. Why did I not think of that....:o Its very good news its been rediscovered anyway.:)
 
Jurek7 said:
If you ever tried to photograph a small wild animal in torchlight, you would know that ;)
Click to expand...

I have done (by myself too - he had someone to hold the torch), he has over 600 images, but only 17 seconds of video. Even 30 seconds of it standing still and then finally running off into the dark would be better.

:p

Hix
 
It is pretty pointless rewinding over the short video footage. Rather I would wait till the Queensland Museum presentation. If any of you close to home would attend, we would have a very very very interesting direct review available. ;)
 
Kifaru Bwana said:
It is pretty pointless rewinding over the short video footage. Rather I would wait till the Queensland Museum presentation. If any of you close to home would attend, we would have a very very very interesting direct review available. ;)
Click to expand...

I am actually in Brisbane this week, so would be keen to attend the talk, but can't find any details of it online? Does anyone have any info?
 
zooboy28 said:
I am actually in Brisbane this week, so would be keen to attend the talk, but can't find any details of it online? Does anyone have any info?
Click to expand...
I believe it is only for select persons of importance, not for your regular just-interested persons.

EDIT: yes, you would have to contact John Young if you want to attend, but you would be out of luck unless you can give a good reason. But presumably soon after there will be details released.
 
zooboy28 said:
I am actually in Brisbane this week, so would be keen to attend the talk, but can't find any details of it online? Does anyone have any info?
Click to expand...

What takes you to that part if the world? What zoo visits do you have planned?
 
Chlidonias, I understand it is just a private function then for invited guests or is it to present the data / evidence to the world (in which case I would say interested parties of whatever persuasion would be most welcome to attend)?

I would have thought that it given the potential significance of this "discovery" would well place it as a public function free for every interested party to attend. Certainly, us birders would love to be there ... ;)
 
Kifaru Bwana said:
Chlidonias, I understand it is just a private function then for invited guests or is it to present the data / evidence to the world (in which case I would say interested parties of whatever persuasion would be most welcome to attend)?

I would have thought that it given the potential significance of this "discovery" would well place it as a public function free for every interested party to attend. Certainly, us birders would love to be there ... ;)
Click to expand...
As I understand it, it is a private function by invite-only in order to release the news (some sources say to "experts", others say to "the media"). Most people would just release the news to the world at large, but John Young is an odd and secretive sort.
 
You would really think that it would be open to the (paying) public, as well as media and experts, seems weird to close it off. Its not a museum function per se, as the room has been privately hired, so I guess its up to the organiser to determine who attends. It might just be closed because there is no more room once all the experts and media are there.
 
Rare night parrot sighting - Bush Telegraph - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
3 July 2013

The holy grail of ornithology in Australia has finally been found and photographed, according to Queensland naturalist John Young.

The night parrot is Australia's most sought-after bird and is listed by the Smithsonian as one of the world's five most elusive birds.

Mr Young, took photos and video of the bird in May and his images are being unveiled, along with feathers from a nest, to an eager audience of twichers, researchers and scientists in Brisbane at the Queensland Museum today.

Mr Young says he's travelled 11-thousand kilometres on a bike, 320-thousand kilometres in a vehicle and spent 17-thousand hours in the field over fifteen years searching for the night parrot.

He won't be specific about the area where he discovered the bird, other than to say it is in the Lake Eyre Basin

He says spotting the bird will always be a treasured moment.

"To sit there and watch this holy grail come out, like some sort of mythical ghost...it puffed itself up in some sort of alien shape, almost doubling its size, shaped like an echidna, raking it's head on the ground...it was electrifying."

My Young says when he returned to the area a few days later he could hear young ones in the nest.

There are believed to be fewer than 250 left in Australia's inland.

"The site is going to be protected. I want to look after this thing at all costs," he says

"I want to learn how to protect it, find out what it feeds on, the biology of it.

"I now know the bird is totally nocturnal, nothing happens until well after dark and it ceases long before daylight. The calling is incredibly irregular."

But while his instincts are to keep the exact site under wraps, that's not the long term plan.

There is do doubt, down the track we are going to share it with the world"

His biggest fear, apart from a horde of curious and committed birdwatchers arriving in the area, is the feral cat problem.

He says research, which should cost several million dollars, should take place over the next several years.
Click to expand...
 
Mysterious night parrot caught on film - Australian Geographic
3 July 2013

FIFTEEN LONG YEARS of scouring the remote outback of central Australia has paid off for a Queensland ornithologist who has collected the first photographs and video footage of the night parrot, the nation’s most elusive bird.

At a briefing held on Wednesday at the Queensland Museum, in Brisbane, John Young explained how he had spent many years searching spinifex clumps, gibber plains, caves, gullies, salt lakes and countless other habitats across Australia’s arid heart, looking for what has been labelled the holy grail of Australian birding.

“I know now from walking through their habitat that they are the most secretive thing I have ever seen in my life and certainly the hardest [species] I’ve ever worked on,” he said.

The night parrot revealed

The night parrot (Pezoporus occidentals) was described in 1861 and the last live specimen was caught in Western Australia in 1912, but since then, save for a smattering of sightings and several dead specimens, it has barely been seen again.

The most recent unconfirmed sighting was in the Pilbara in 2005, and a dead female was found in Queensland's Diamantina National Park in 2006.

On Saturday it was reported that John had captured the first photographs of the species (see Night parrot confirmed alive again after 30 years?), but it wasn’t until today that a wider selection of photos and a video footage were presented to scientists.

“John has clearly spent many cold nights out there in central Australia sitting and waiting for this bird. It’s a fantastic effort and he has been rewarded with phenomenal footage and images,” said Dr Max Tischler an expert on desert ecology with Bush Heritage Australia.

“The night parrot is a real enigma. It’s got this myth about it – this bird where only a handful of specimens were collected in the late 1800s and then it largely disappeared. A few dead specimens but no footage and no photos, nothing like that,” he told Australian Geographic. “Anyone who’s been out in the desert has always kept their ears and eyes one hoping one might scurry across their paths.”

Cracked the parrot problem

“John has cracked the problem of how to find and how to hang on to them,” said Dr Leo Joseph, director of the CSIRO Australian National Wildlife Collection in Canberra, who congratulated him on his achievement. “Nobody has been able to reliably report finding a night parrot before now and the problem has been getting back to the same spot and relocating them.”

To the collective gasps and murmurs of crowd of ornithology enthusiasts and experts, John revealed a number of close-up images and a six seconds of video footage, which appeared to show the bird hopping along the ground, kangaroo-style – a behaviour not well known in other species of parrot.

In a number of years studying birds at an undisclosed site in far western Queensland he says he has learnt much about the biology of the species. “You can’t pin something down until you know it really well,” John told the gathering.

One insight is that they live very deep within clumps of spinifex and only emerge at night, not dawn and dusk as was previously thought.

John says that – based on the shape of the beak and from samples of guano collected – he also doesn’t believe the species is mostly a seed eater as had been supposed. From fragments of insects, such as wing cases, found in the birds’ waste and below roosts found deep in clumps of spinifex, he estimates that “at least a third of its diet is insects.”

Succulent plants are also thought to form part of its diet and may be an important water source.

Unusual biology of the bird

John says there may be several breeding pairs at the site and one of the females may have been brooding a nest of young based on the calls he has heard. The location of the site is tightly under wraps at the moment and has yet to be revealed to other experts or the authorities. An air of secrecy surrounded much of the information released at the briefing today.

Photographs were not available for online distribution at all at this stage and audio clips of the call were not released either, to prevent birders from using them to attract night parrots and potentially disturbing the secretive birds.

John recounted the story of how late one night in 2009 in central Australia he awoke to the distant sound of what seemed to him to be an unusual kind of parrot call he had never heard before. He attempted to copy the whistles himself and was able to attract two birds in within about 20m which he was convinced were night parrots.

“We got the first call ever of the bird that night,” says John who recorded the song and then subsequently used it to attract night parrots in for study and to capture the photographs and video footage that he got on 26 May this year.

He described how on that night the recording elicited an aggressive and territorial response in a male bird which approached close enough to be photographed.

“He was tapping the ground...banging his feet on the ground, chucking stones everywhere and when he eventually came around the front, he was puffed up like an echidna, double the size. I’ve never seen a parrot do that in my life,” John said.

“The more I played it the more aggressive he becomes. He started to scream like a budgerigar... Making really loud budgerigar-type noises and I heard something that night I’ll probably never hear again, because I won’t be playing a call in their territory again ever.”

Courting controversy

Some of the features of the birds’ biology revealed by John Young “explains why it has taken so long to find it,” says Max Tischler. “It’s ground dwelling and lives in very dense vegetation and if it’s very shy and doesn’t respond readily to calls then that makes it very difficult to detect. Against it’s just one of the really puzzling aspects of this bird.”

Controversy has courted John in the past , and claims he has made regarding rare bird sightings have been challenged (see Night parrot confirmed alive again after 30 years?), but this time he made sure to have a solid body of evidence before making the discovery public. “I made some mistakes in the past, but I bloody well didn’t this time because I took the [memory] card out and locked it in the bank,” he said.

Experts are now considering how best to protect the western Queensland site and control predators such as cats and foxes which could threaten the survival of what is undoubtedly a thinly distributed species.
Click to expand...
 
Sounds promising.

:p

Hix
 
I now understand why it was meant to be private.

I hope this historic discovery will propel the Continent on a quest to establish the population numbers of the night parrot now we have just uncovered some of its biology.
 
Why would he say this: "“The more I played it the more aggressive he becomes. He started to scream like a budgerigar... Making really loud budgerigar-type noises and I heard something that night I’ll probably never hear again, because I won’t be playing a call in their territory again ever.”"
 
nanoboy said:
Why would he say this: "“The more I played it the more aggressive he becomes. He started to scream like a budgerigar... Making really loud budgerigar-type noises and I heard something that night I’ll probably never hear again, because I won’t be playing a call in their territory again ever.”"
Click to expand...
Indeed. He says he has been going around playing the call for several years now attracting the parrots, but only these current ones responded closely enough that he could photograph them. And he kept playing the call at these particular birds (which he knows were nesting there because he found the nest and took some feathers from it).

But now he says he will not release the recording because it is so harmful to the birds and no-one must know about it. (My paraphrasing obviously).

Its going to be a bit hard to survey for the parrots to determine their distribution and estimate their population so something can be done to protect their range if he won't give anybody any details beyond "look, I saw them. That's all you need to know."
 
Chlidonias said:
Indeed. He says he has been going around playing the call for several years now attracting the parrots, but only these current ones responded closely enough that he could photograph them. And he kept playing the call at these particular birds (which he knows were nesting there because he found the nest and took some feathers from it).

But now he says he will not release the recording because it is so harmful to the birds and no-one must know about it. (My paraphrasing obviously).

Its going to be a bit hard to survey for the parrots to determine their distribution and estimate their population so something can be done to protect their range if he won't give anybody any details beyond "look, I saw them. That's all you need to know."
Click to expand...

Congrats on 11,000 posts. ;)

I can understand the secrecy - I can just imagine a convoy of a few irresponsible birders heading out there if the coordinates were published on Eremaea. However, I want to believe that he will link up with some ornithologists and Birdlife Australia or something so that a coordinated effort could be made towards a conservation plan. Surely he will do that, right?
 
nanoboy said:
Congrats on 11,000 posts. ;)
Click to expand...

I never even realised!

nanoboy said:
I can understand the secrecy - I can just imagine a convoy of a few irresponsible birders heading out there if the coordinates were published on Eremaea. However, I want to believe that he will link up with some ornithologists and Birdlife Australia or something so that a coordinated effort could be made towards a conservation plan. Surely he will do that, right?
Click to expand...
one would hope he would try and coordinate something with conservation parties but who knows. He's an odd one.

The recording of the call is the absolute key, because without it they can't tell where birds are and where they are not. It's of no use saying that an area of land "looks suitable" and protecting it if there aren't any night parrots in it to start with.

With regards to individual birders, I personally don't like the use of recordings to attract birds because I see it as interfering with the bird's life rather than just watching them going about their business, but frankly there aren't many birders in Australia and the places where night parrots live are pretty remote really, so it probably wouldn't have much affect on them. (I'm meaning if the call was available but not John Young's specific locality - which is on private land anyway - so individual birders out looking would not be all in one spot, they would be spread out over the years over a wide part of the outback).
 
It's possible the birds are nomadic too, so protecting an area where they have been seen (or heard) may be useless if the birds were only passing through. To discover their movements some may have to be caught and fitted with a radio transmitter that gives GPS co-ordinates. The Birds Australia Rarities Committee - or some other group of scientists created specifically for Night Parrot research - should be the ones doing the research.

Considering the vast area concerned, it's likely to be a long and expensive project.

:p

Hix
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top