1 January 2011

Just about any conversation between bird watchers anywhere in central Australia will almost certainly turn to a discussion about Night Parrots. They are mystical birds, bordering on mythical beasts. Few other birds anywhere in the world are as intriguing. There are no photographs of living birds and no recordings of their calls.

A Night Parrot was once transported alive by ship to London Zoo and observed to be strictly nocturnal. Much of what we know about the birds is from these early encounters.

No person alive can set out to find them with success. Consequently, a rich and enticing folk-lore has accumulated. Like the one that flew into the cabin of a truck in the Pilbara in 1975. The driver put it into a box, but it escaped during the night. Or the one that was recovered from a water tank at Haast’s Bluff in 1957…

The last confirmed living Night Parrot was observed at Nichol Spring, WA in 1912; it was observed, and then shot and skinned. Its crop was filled with spinifex seed and “limestone herbage”. The following 80 or so years yielded so few substantiated records that many people believed that Night Parrots had followed Paradise Parrots into extinction.

But then, almost miraculously, confirmation of their continued existence came in 1990, when a road-killed specimen was collected by ornithologists near Boulia, south-western Queensland. And then a similar miracle occurred in 2006 when a dead individual was discovered under a barbed-wire fence in Diamantina National Park, again in south-western Queensland.

Despite the lack of confirmed Night Parrot sightings over the past 100 or so years, there has been a constant trickle of unconfirmed reports surfacing from right throughout the species’ distribution. Given the recent Queensland specimens, it is reasonable that at least some of these unconfirmed records are authentic. However, the bar for confirmation of such reports is set very high – the species’ cryptic colouration, nocturnal habits, and apparent rarity with no history of sightings from any one locality all dictate stringent recording criteria for Night Parrot records to be accepted as confirmed.

The discovery of the 2006 specimen prompted a look at where we are at with understanding and conserving this enigmatic species. Several informal meetings were held. There was an unspoken but palpable feeling that these birds were giving us all the run around. Especially given that the 2006 specimen was a juvenile. They were out there, they were breeding and they were making fools of us all. It was line-in-the-sand time. But where were we to start?

Night Parrot sightings between 1845 and 2007. The number of sightings per cell defines the transparency of each cell. Dark red = many recent sightings and dark green = many old sightings. The cluster of records from the Boulia and Diamantina area comes from a cluster of records from the mid 1990s to 2000s.

Over the years, several dedicated expeditions have been led with the express purpose of locating living birds, and all, but one, failed to record so much as a feather. That one, led by Shane Parker and Rex Ellis who rode camels throughout remote parts of north-eastern South Australia in May 1979, flushed three birds from Bassia and sandhill country. But without a photograph, or a feather, Parker’s record remains as unconfirmed fodder to fuel lively debate.

Most expeditions have relied upon the intuitively appealing strategy of looking for Night Parrots at tiny, isolated water points during exceptionally dry times. But in reality, this strategy has been so spectacularly unsuccessful, that it might actually be trying to tell us something about the biology of the species.

And so, resisting the urge to rush out into Diamantina National Park to look for breeding pairs, it was decided that we needed to get cleverer about deciding where, and when, to look. We collected as many Night Parrot records as we could get our hands on and we scored them for authenticity. In doing so, we hoped to sort the wheat from the chaff and thereby strengthen what was sure to be a noisy dataset, full of sightings that could have been anything from Elegant Parrots to Owlet-Nightjars.

The idea was to examine our sightings database for consistent ecological signals that could help to narrow the time-space window we should look through to catch a glimpse of a Night Parrot.

Unfortunately, we have been somewhat hampered by a lack of reliable ecological information about the arid zone. For instance, there are no national vegetation maps with enough detail, and other things, like recreating fire history (which could be an important factor) involves an immense amount of computer processing time. Instead, we looked at two things that early naturalists said were important factors – rainfall and topography.

Although the data are yet to be fully analysed, we uncovered a hint that suggests Night Parrots are more likely to be seen after above average rainfall. And they are also more likely in mid-elevation areas with rugged topography. The corollary is that they are probably moving out of areas that are exceptionally dry and this might explain why those previous searches that have focussed on dry periods have proved fruitless.

Their predilection for wet times and places might also help explain their apparent rarity. After surprisingly little rain, the dendritic river channels and extensive black soil plains in the Diamantina area – where the recent specimens were recovered – turn into impassable barriers. Such conditions tend to curtail the movements of people, especially those who are keenly interested in birds, for fear of becoming stranded for weeks, if not months on end.

So if you want to see a Night Parrot, pack your wellies and brolly and be prepared to spend a few potentially wet weeks scouring some rugged range country in central Australia. If you’re lucky you might catch a glimpse of a bird flushing from right under your feet and then flying low and direct, quail-like, until taking a plunging dive back into the spinifex.If it calls pull out your mobile phone and record it. Forget trying to get a photo! We know what they look like. Whereas obtaining a recording of their call could provide us with the great leap forward we need in order to locate a population for study.

Written by Steve Murphy, based on work and discussions with fellow members of the Night Parrot predictive modelling team, Allan Burbidge, Leo Joseph, Ian McAllan, William Venables and Edward King.

Night Parrot transported live to London

ight Parrot (Pezoporus occidentalis) - an artists drawing by Martin Thompson (source, Wikimedia Commons).

The following account is a transcript of Murie, J (1868) from the Proceedings of the Royal Zoological Society of London. It is the only detailed living account of the species ever made.

“Dr Mueller, of Melbourne, our active and obliging Corresponding Member, transmitted to this country a specimen of parrot-like bird, which proved to be the Western or Nocturnal Ground-Parrakeet of Mr Gould, Geopsittacus occidentalis.

During the short period it remained in the Gardens, its habits were carefully watched by our Superintendent, Mr A.D. Bartlett. He arrived at the same conclusion as Dr. Mueller, namely, that it is chiefly a nocturnal bird … I need only add two facts mentioned by him : – one, that it showed a preference for green food; the other, that its voice was a double note, harsh and loud.

While I saw the bird during the day it remained motionless on its tuft of grass, and only became lively towards sundown. In daylight, the eye had a singular expression, reminding one of the appearances characteristic of the Owls, Lemuroids, and such like night-feeding animals.”