The following is a transcript of my story published in The Weekend Australia of 22-23 Deceember, 2024
The young grazier and wildlife enthusiast suspected he was on to something special. In December 1920, Cyril Jerrard was riding his horse through the woodlands of the South Burnett Valley in south-east Queensland when he heard an unfamiliar musical “whit whit” call. A pair of slender, long-tailed parrots flew up from the ground.
Jerrard had rediscovered the paradise parrot, regarded by many as one of the world’s most beautiful birds. His notes and diaries about multiple encounters with the parrot over several years are a treasure trove of information. Jerrard’s century-old scribblings about the little-known paradise parrot, the only species on mainland Australia to have become extinct since European settlement, are published in a new book to be launched next week.
“Cyril’s Parrots – Cyril Jerrard and the extinct Paradise Parrot” is penned by Tony Pridham, a leading Australian wildlife artist. The parrot is brought vibrantly to life in paintings based on Pridham’s meticulous study of museum specimens and Jerrard’s notes. Some of those paintings are reproduced in this blog post.
The explorer-naturalist John Gilbert discovered the species in 1844 near Yandilla on the Darling Downs, west of Toowoomba. Gilbert was collecting specimens for renowned British ornithologist John Gould. When dispatching specimens of the parrot to Gould in London, Gilbert described it as “without exception the most beautiful of the whole tribe”.
Gilbert was killed a year later when he was speared by Aborigines while on an expedition to northern Australia led by Ludwig Leichardt. In the same year, 1845, Gould formally described the parrot, giving it the scientific name pulcherrimus, which translates as “multicoloured and superlatively beautiful”; Gould said the species was an “object of no ordinary interest”.
The slippery road to extinction began soon after. Many parrots were shot for museum and private collections. Others were trapped for aviary enthusiasts, who complained that none survived in captivity more than a few months. Woodland habitat was cleared for agriculture. Habitat change followed altered fire regimes after the departure of Aborigines. The woodlands were choked by an invasion of exotic prickly pear.
The birds nest in termite mounds, popularly known as anthills, which were bulldozed for house flooring and tennis court base. With the nest hole close to the ground, birds were vulnerable to introduced foxes and cats. As Pridham observes: “It was indeed the death of a thousand cuts.”
Jerrard writes in his notes: “The most fatal change of all for the seed-eating parrot was that the nutritious native cereals, like oat or kangaroo grass, were dying out under overstocking by sheep and cattle.” By the end of the 1800s the bird was scarce. The federation drought of the early-1900s seemingly wiped out the survivors; it was widely thought to have became extinct around the turn of last century.
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| Cyril Jerrard |
The parrot was restricted to woodland in the interior of south-east Queensland. In 1918, journalist-naturalist Alec Chisholm penned a newspaper article, noting the parrot once occurred in “considerable numbers” but this “attractive little Queenslander has been utterly wiped out”, although he hoped that “maybe a few” survived.
Indeed they had. Jerrard was given a copy of the article. It was on his mind as he worked the family property north of the Boondooma district two years later. Jerrard recalls the moment he found his parrots: “I drew rein and followed with my eyes two pretty birds – parrots unmistakably…” They allowed close approach. Jerrard observed the male was “exceedingly beautiful”; the female “pretty but more modest of garb”; both were “very graceful in their shape and movements”.
Jerrard penned an essay in 1924 which he intended to publish but didn’t get around to it. It is reproduced in Pridham’s book, described by the author as a “precious document that gives us by far the most detailed and personal description of the birds from life”. Jerrard recalls a nesting event in 1922 that resulted in the only photographs taken of the parrot. He had checked scores of anthills for the tell-tale small holes that parrots drill as entrances to nest hollows deep inside anthills. He eventually found birds excavating a hole, a task taking seven weeks to complete.
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| Cyril Jerrard at the parrot nesting mound |
Jerrard set up a hide. With his ancient Kodak Premo camera primed, he waited. The male bird landed on the anthill, obliging for the first photograph of the species. Writes Jerrard: “It was one of the supreme moments of my life.” Then as camera plates were changed, the male moved to the nest hole, peering in, as the female landed: “Oh kind fortune! I fired again, both birds posing, for just the instant required.” It was the only image ever captured of a female paradise parrot or a pair, although Jerrard managed a few more of the male. Nobody else has photographed the species.
It became evident after several weeks that the eggs had not hatched. Jerrard opened the anthill, finding five rotten eggs. Speculating that the precariously small population had led to inbreeding and egg infertility, he lamented: “I hoped to photograph the young birds when they became fledglings, and then to see them prosper and help repopulate the district.”
Jerrard enlisted the help of neighbours in spotting parrots. His diaries record a total of 36 encounters over eight years through the 1920s, indicating low numbers. Old bushmen talked about how the bird, which they called the anthill parrot, had been numerous. Most 1920s observations were of a single pair, with an occasional small flock with young. The parrots fed on grass seed by tracks: “They court notice by feeding and nesting in places which are particularly open to observation by man.”
Jerrard noted that a colourful seed-eating finch, the diamond firetail, was common locally. The finch today is also absent from the area - further indication that reduced food sources due to grazing was a key factor in the parrot’s demise. Paradise parrots sometimes fed in millet and other grain fields, however, being “not slow to avail themselves of a new food supply provided by man”, Jerrard wrote. A case of too little too late perhaps: his last recorded sighting was by a neighbour in 1928.
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| The iconic image of the parrot pair on the nest |
Most of Jerrard’s birds were along what was then called Weir Weir Road, since renamed Jerrards Road in his honour, and the adjoining Manar Road. Visited last week by Inquirer, Jerrards Road appears much as it did a century ago – a little-used dirt track flanked by woodland and dotted with a plethora of termite mounds. Seeding native grasses, much loved by the parrots, were abundant following years of good rainfall. From information in Jerrard’s diaries, it is possible to locate precisely feeding places frequented by the parrots.
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| Jerrards Road last week |
After Jerrard found his birds in 1920, he alerted Alec Chisholm, the journalist who rang the alarm bells two years earlier. Chisholm travelled to Boondooma, saw the parrots and published accounts of Jerrard’s sightings. Despite international interest in the fate of the parrot by then, nobody else ventured to the South Burnett to see the birds, suggesting Jerrard and Chisholm kept their whereabouts a secret, presumably due to concern about aviculturalists who offered huge rewards for a captive pair. Jerrard’s stamping ground remains little-known to this day.
Seven years after the last Bondooma sighting, 80km to the north-east, paradise parrots were again spotted. Eric Zillmann, like Jerrard a farmhand and wildlife enthusiast, observed birds on multiple occasions on horseback between 1935 and 1938. The then teenager saw them at Wallaville near Gin Gin, inland from Bundaberg, while helping his father muster cattle.
Speaking at home in a Bundaberg retirement village this week, the sprightly 101-year-old’s memory is clear: “The parrots were seen every time we went cattle dipping. Once a month in summer, when the ticks are bad, always on the ground on the edge of the track. They fly a short way and drop down again.” This behaviour mirrors that described by Jerrard.
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| Eric Zillmann in Bundaberg last week |
Zillmann recalls the birds’ appearance: “The brilliant red on the male’s wings flashing, the brown and green, the female a bit more dull.” In 1938 he found a nest with eggs in a razed anthill. Zillmann was one of a party of workers tasked with removing 13 truckloads of anthill for tennis court base - an indication of the extent of loss of the birds’ nesting refuges. Anthills are scarce in the Gin Gin area today; Zillmann’s parrot haunts along Currajong Farm Road are lost in a sea of macadamia nut plantations.
While in Papua New Guinea as a serviceman in 1943, Zillmann was told in a letter from his mother: “Your father said to tell you the parrots are still there.” It was also in 1943 that Jerrard drowned in a farm dam at the age of 54 at Boondooma. In 1963, Zillmann tracked down the famous anthill where Jerrard’s birds were photographed four decades earlier; it collapsed finally in the early-1970s. The natural history community’s always scanty links to the paradise paradise are fading. Eric Zillmann, who was awarded an OAM in 1999 for service to the “observation, recording and promotion of Australia's natural history”, is the only person alive who has seen the bird.
No paradise parrots have been reliably recorded since Zillmann’s time, despite numerous claims of sightings. Scores of expeditions have been mounted. Such is the level of interest that when a convincing claim was made in 1990, three expeditions headed off, one led by Queensland Government minister Pat Comben; more than 130,000 square kilometres were combed. Like other reports, it was a false alarm. In the early 1980s, controversial North Queensland naturalist John Young claimed to have discovered paradise parrots nesting in woodland near Ingham; searches failed to find birds or supporting evidence.
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| John Young |
The refusal by many to accept that the Holy Grail of the bird world is extinct recalls ongoing debate about the fate of the thylacine. Although unlikely, there remains a slim chance that the parrot is holding out in remote places.
The closest relative of the paradise parrot is the golden-shouldered parrot. Once common in the savannah woodlands of Cape York in north Queensland, its population has been reduced to a few hundred and continues to fall. The causes are similar: reduced grass seed supply due to grazing and habitat changes forced by altered fire regimes. Says Eric Zillmann: “I hope the golden-shouldered doesn’t go the same way as the paradise parrot.”
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| Golden-shouldered Parrot |
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