National News

Night parrot sighting in Western Australia shocks birdwatching world

RN By Ann Jones for Off Track                   Updated 23 Mar 2017, 4:36pm
A group of four birdwatchers from Broome has photographed Australia's most mysterious bird, the night parrot, in Western Australia.


While the group described the parrot as a "fat budgerigar", the sighting was the equivalent of winning the bird watching lotto.

"I grew up knowing that the bird was extinct and didn't expect to ever see one in my life," says Adrian Boyle from Broome, part of the group that found the bird.

"I just knew it was a fairly small green and yellow parrot that used to live in deserts in spinifex countries that was sort of the unseeable, that it was the holy grail if you get to see one."

To find the bird, the team travelled to a habitat they identified by poring over detailed aerial maps, and camped out, listening for the calls of the largely nocturnal parrot.
PHOTO: Adrian Boyle, Nigel Jackett, George Swann and Bruce Greatwich, who discovered the parrot in WA. (Supplied: Bruce Greatwich)
"The night before, we actually heard the birds, which sounded very unusual to us actually. We couldn't sleep, we were just pondering the question: 'what was making this noise?'" says Nigel Jackett, a warden at the Broome Bird Observatory.




The sighting increases the known range of animals by thousands of kilometres, from the site in Western Queensland all the way across the Northern Territory to patch of rocky spinifex in Western Australia, the exact location of which is not being disclosed.

The birds are so difficult to spot, even in their known Queensland habitat, that even the chair of the Night Parrot Recovery Team, Allan Burbidge, hasn't even seen one.

"Not for lack of trying too," says Dr Burbidge, also a principal research scientist with the WA Department of Parks and Wildlife. "It's a species that is really hard to detect.

"It's active at night, you don't see them walking around in the day time, and until relatively recently, we didn't know what the calls were, so we didn't know how to look, where to look."



Topics: endangered-and-protected-species, environment, birds, animal-science, broome-6725, wa, australia

First posted 23 Mar 2017, 9:35am
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