Night Parrot: More bits and pieces from the new book

Night Parrot - pic by John Young

I wrote about Penny Olsen's new book, Night Parrot, in The Weekend Australian of 11-12 August, 2018, highlighting research issues between Bush Heritage Australia and Australian Wildlife Conservacy; ongoing controversy over John Young's 2013 rediscovery; and the disappointingly low number of Night Parrots recorded since then. There is much more to the book, however. I'm outlining here a grab bag of notes from the book, with a bit of commentary woven through.

Captain Charles Sturt mounted two expeditions through the Australian outback in search of an inland sea. He didn't find a sea, but his expedition naturalist, John McDouall Stuart, collected the first specimen of a night parrot in 1845 on the second of these forays. The bird was shot on the western edge of Lake Lady Blanche in northern South Australia. Thought initially to be a Ground Parrot, it was not until 1861 that John Gould recognised it as a new species. Sturt noted the bird had “dark green plumage mottled with black”.

A total of just 28 Night Parrot specimens are known, 22 collected by Frederick Andrews in South Australia. All but one of Andrews' birds were taken in the Gawler Ranges of northern Eyre Peninsula in the 1870s and early-1880s. Andrews made observations similar to those noted at Pullen Pullen Reserve in south-west Queensland, where Young made his discovery. For instance, Andrews says “in some instances I have known them to fly a distance of 4 or 5 miles”; the distance of 6.4-8km is similar to that undertaken nightly by parrots at Pullen Pullen. 

In the book, Olsen chronicles numerous expeditions mounted to search for the bird after its numbers crashed in the 1880s, when the last confirmed specimen was collected. A specimen claimed in 1912 by Martin Bourgoin from Western Australia was lost and cannot be verified, although Olsen appears to accept its authenticity.

Among the more enthusiastic Night Parrot searchers was Boer War veteran Samuel White, who conducted numerous expeditions in the 1910s and 1920s to “every haunt where there was a record of the bird having been seen in the early days”. Often White was accompanied by his wife Ethel, who was such a novelty in the outback that she often was the first white woman seen by Aborigines. Olsen clearly has a soft spot for Australian history. While some of her accounts of the early ornithogists are entertaining, there is a great deal of biographical information in the book that has nothing to do with Night Parrots.

While no Night Parrots were recorded with certainty in Queensland until a dead bird was found near Boulia in 1990, there were plenty of unconfirmed reports. Doctor-cum-ornithologist William Macgillivray wrote in 1920 that four “extremely rare spinifex or night parrots” were seen on Nappa Merrie Station by Clive Conrick around the Cooper Creek in the Channel Country. Conrick's neighbour, Albert Walker, managed the neighbouring Innamincka Station across across the border in South Australia; Walker recorded that he “frequently” saw Night Parrots until 1885, when there was an invasion of feral cats.

Cats feature also in the writings of CH McLennan in 1907 about the Night Parrot in the mallee of the sunset country in western Victoria. McLennan noted the bird's “plaintive whistling note heard in the still of night”. The parrots were “unfortunately becoming extinct” because hundreds of cats had been released in the mallee to control rabbits. Cats appear to be scarce in the Queensland area frequented by parrots; perhaps their numbers are kept in check by dingoes, which had not been heavily persecuted by local pastoralists.

Night Parrot habitat - Diamantina National Park

The night parrot expeditions continued as the decades rolled by. In 1972, 26 technical college students travelling in two mini-buses camped for three weeks by the Diamantina River looking for the birds. They had to give up when bulldust clogged one of their engines.

News of the 1990 Boulia discovery was broken by me in the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald. The semi-mummified carcass was found on the roadside by Walter Boles, Wayne Longmore and Max Thompson, who were on an Australian Museum expedition. The year before, in 1989, entrepreneur Dick Smith had offered $50,000 for scientific evidence of the bird surviving. Smith was initially reluctant to part with the money; after “spirited discussion” over whether a dead parrot met his requirements, Smith's Australian Geographic Society handed over a cheque to the museum.

A second semi-mummified corpse was found in September 2006 in Diamantina National Park, 200km from Boulia, by ranger Robert (Shorty) Cupitt. That find was made public by me in the pages of The Australian in February 2007. The Queensland Government had kept it a secret for five months for reasons it has never properly explained.

It is perhaps surprising, with the benefit of hindsight, that John Young was the first and only person to follow up Cupitt's find, other than a bit of cursory looking around by park rangers. It was in this breakaway country of the Mayne Range, where the boundaries of Brighton Downs Station and Diamantina National Park meet, that Young focused his search in 2007, although he says he had searched other places earlier. The bird first photographed by Young was just 11 kilometres from Cupitt's dead parrot (that's not in the book).

Olsen is no friend of Young and is relentless in her attacks on him in the book. She says he had in the past made “unbelievable” claims about owl survey numbers and discovering Paradise Parrots with eggs. His claim in 2006 to have discovered a new bird, the Blue-browed Fig-Parrot, in the rainforests of north-east NSW was “based on a fabricated photo and a story that grew with the telling”.

Olsen concedes, however, that the July 2013 announcement by Young that he had photographed a Night Parrot for the first time was the “avian find of the century and a personal triumph for Young”. She notes no living person had definitely seen a Night Parrot until then. But in a video screened as the discovery was announced at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, there was “something amiss… a wing appeared to hang slightly and the bird's gait was odd”.

Night Parrot nest - pic by Steve Murphy

I detail in The Weekend Australian how Olsen and ecologist Steve Murphy, who once collaborated with Young but fell out of favour with him, suggest Young's bird was injured and captured to be set up for a photographic session. John Stewart, who was with Young at the time of the discovery, went public to insist the bird came in of its own accord and that the pair was unaware of any injuries.

Olsen says Young had “indisputably put in some hard yards in tough country”, but his claims to have spent 17,000 hours searching over 15 years, riding 11,000km on a bike and driving 320,000 km in a vehicle “seem embellished”. Of Young's first photographs, Olsen says: “These were not obviously doctored images, as had been the case with the fabulous fig-parrot.”

Olsen relates how Young took Steve Murphy into his confidence, showing him the bird in a part of Brighton Downs Station that was to be acquired by Bush Heritage Australia and named Pullen Pullen Reserve. In Cairns in 2011, Young played Murphy a recording of a four-note call from what he believed was a Night Parrot. Young called Murphy in 2013, before the announcement, to tell him “with great excitement that he had 600 images and 200 feathers” from a Night Parrot. As the two worked together in subsequent months, Murphy “felt that he was on a tightrope… knowing that John Young quickly dropped anyone who challenged him”. Murphy told Olsen he wanted a follow-up plan for further research focused on habitat requirements, detection, threats and nesting.

Murphy was so distrustful of Young that he secretly recorded playback of the bird's call on a USB stick when Young first played it while the pair was together in the field, “just in case their arrangement went pear-shaped”. In his field notes, however, Murphy praises Young: “Despite his obtuse manner, can't help but like the guy. Most incredible field ornithologist ever. Egg collecting past really allowed him to hone his skills to an awesome degree.”

The Night Parrot Recovery Team was established in 2014. Writes Olsen: “Finally, the time was right – there was: a known Night Parrot location; funding; an advisory panel; Murphy with his survey experience and scientific skills and political sensibilities; and Young, the talented and tenacious field naturalist.”

Murphy and Bush Heritage Australia refused initially to release playback of the bird's call – or precious little other information - so others could search for parrots in new localities. That stance was criticised by many birders, who felt secrecy over calls and the bird's general whereabouts (without giving away specific site information) could hamper discovery efforts.

Olsen reveals Young was not invited to a secret meeting between Peter Britton, the owner of Brighton Downs, and BHA which resulted in Britton subdividing 56,000ha of the station to establish Pullen Pullen; BHA acquired the reserve in 2016. In a glaring case of bureaucratic idiocy, the excision was initially opposed by the Queensland Government on the grounds the 56,000ha was not viable as a pastoral lease.

BHA got off to a bad start by evidently stuffing up the naming of the reserve. Pullen Pullen is supposedly the local Aboriginal name for Night Parrot. Olsen says it is an “erroneous moniker”; leading linguists could find no evidence for it in the literature and indigenous languages in the area did not have final consonants.

Meanwhile, relations between Young and Murphy deteriorated. Olsen writes of how Young became “disgruntled at his increasing loss of control of the situation and the research project”. Young and Murphy were part of a research effort funded by an offsets grant from Fortescue Metals. Young finally quit in early-2015 following a row with Murphy over the placement of sound recorders.

Twelve months later, Young was hired as a senior ecologist by Australian Wildlife Conservancy. Part of his job is to research Night Parrots in Diamantina National Park, which adjoins Pullen Pullen. BHA and AWC are Australia's two biggest private conservation groups. They work in close proximity to each other on Night Parrot research but do not share information.

Olsen gets stuck into me for revealing in May 2016 in The Australian that Brighton Downs was where Young rediscovered his Night Parrot. At the time, the information was not publicly available. Olsen said I “truly overstepped the mark”. BHA was forced to install surveillance cameras and implement other security measures to guard against, among others, “overenthusiastic birdwatchers”.

I and others argued that birders could be BHA's biggest ally in its efforts to protect the Night Parrot, but as Alice Springs birding guide Mark Carter said, “instead we're treated like lepers”. I did not in fact reveal where the birds were; instead I identified a sprawling 420,00ha property in the hope that other searches would be mounted in that region in search of further populations. As it transpires, the hordes of destructive twitchers did not materialise; just a handful of groups have ventured to the remote area to look for Night Parrots.

Penny Olsen

Olsen notes that while the reserve was being established, Britton asked Murphy to write a list of rules for BHA staff after volunteers brought dogs into the area, which was still being grazed by cattle at the time.

Olsen has another go at me because in March 2017 I reported that “glamping” trips to Pullen Pullen were being hawked among wealthy birders overseas, offering a visit for $25,000 a head. Olsen accuses me of a “blatant misrepresentation” of BHA policy, which takes wealthy donors to reserves “to see what they are funding”. Olsen ignores the email which prompted my story in The Australian; it was sent by Adam Riley, the head of South African bird tour company Rockjumper. For the record, Riley says in the email he was invited on an exclusive six-person trip “to see the Night Parrot” and he was in contact because “with your interest in the bird, I thought I would offer you the opportunity”.

Olsen records how it was with relief, given how tiny the south-west Queensland population remained years after Young's announcement, that the bird was found 2000km away in the Murchison area of Western Australia in March 2017 by Nigel Jackett, Bruce Greatwich, George Swann and Adrian Boyle. Olsen makes no reference to the controversy generated by the disappearance of two birds at that site when one was later netted and fitted with a radio transmitter by the Night Parrot Recovery Team.

In May 2017, Mark Carter and fellow Alice Springs ornithologist Chris Watson “probably” detected a Night Parrot call on a sound recorder south of Alice Springs. Olsen says it is ironic that Carter and Watson vowed not to share location data for the site given they were “among the most vocal critics of the need for initial secrecy regarding Pullen Pullen”. Carter says in response that the issue at the time of the Pullen Pullen stand-off was whether call recordings should be released, not whether the site should remain secret.

In October 2017, a Night Parrot in flight was captured in a camera trip near Mulan in the Great Sandy Desert of WA. Young says he has found Night Parrots at several sites in Diamantina National Park as well as in the Goneaway National Park further east, and in Kalamurina Sanctuary in northern South Australia. Olsen claims in the book that none of these records are confirmed but AWC, ecologist Rod Kavanagh and academic Peter Valentine have disputed this.

Young was not interviewed by Olsen for the book although Murphy was, and at length. Olsen says Young was invited to contribute an account of his discovery but nothing was received. There is a good deal of material about the birds' behaviour and movements in Pullen Pullen, almost all of it from Murphy, which I won't repeat here as it is already in the public arena. The book will be published next month by CSIRO Publishing, RRP $50, 360pages.