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| The night parrot recently netted - Pic by Rachel Barr |
The following is the text of my news story and feature on the Night Parrot in the 29-30 August edition of The Weekend Australian.
NEWS STORY
Grooming traps to secure site for rare birds
Newly
designed traps that kill feral cats with a poisonous spray will be
operating soon at a site in south-west Queensland that is home to the
only known population of the critically endangered night parrot.
Sharp-shooters
were deployed on the remote property this week and soft jaw traps
were set in a concerted bid to eradicate several feral cats that are
prowling the area.
The
menace of feral cats has emerged as the biggest threat to the
survival of the population, with as few as 10 birds at the site on a
grazing property south-west of Winton.
The
“grooming” traps to be set soon are able to detect and identify
cats that pass within five metres, triggering a spray of deadly gel
which is ingested when the animal grooms by licking its fur.
The
Australian revealed earlier this month new photographs and video
footage of a night parrot taken by research scientist Steve Murphy on
the property. Bush Heritage Australia is in the process of acquiring
56,000ha of the land so it can be protected as a reserve.
The
night parrot was once widespread throughout inland Australia but has
disappeared from many places where it was common.
Dr
Murphy believes the south-west Queensland population has survived
because the rocky terrain has kept wildfires in check. His
unpublished research reveals that large, old-growth spinifix patches
are the favoured habitat of the mysterious parrot.
Dr
Murphy said relatively few feral cats, which were voracious predators
of night parrots elsewhere in the past, had been detected at the
site. He believes this is because they find it difficult to hunt in
areas where the predominant vegetation is prickly, unburnt spinifex –
a habitat that was once widespread but is now scarce because of the
increasing incidence of fire since European settlement.
“It
seems that the parrots may be able to find safe refuge to some extent
in this old spinifex,” he said.
However,
a single cat could learn how to hunt night parrots and potentially
wipe the population out. Bush Heritage Australia north chief
executive Rob Murphy said cats were “top of our hit list” of
management priorities.
Mr
Murphy said the grooming traps, being developed in partnership with
South Australian company Ecological Horizons, had promising potential
to control cat numbers.
“This
is exciting new technology and we hope it will help us to eradicate
cats in the parrot's
core habitat,” Mr
Murphy said.
The
night parrot, one of the world's rarest birds, had been known from a
handful of records over the past century before it was photographed
on the property by north Queensland naturalist John Young in 2013
following a six-year search.
Mr
Young, whose discovery made news internationally, had been working
with Dr Murphy and Bush Heritage Australia on night parrot management
and research at the site but ended his involvement several months
ago.
Mr
Young has taken to social media to distance himself from the project.
“The
whole thing has been very hard for me and every day I begin to wonder
whether the heartache, cost and all the effort was worthwhile,” Mr
Young said on his Facebook page, without explaining his reasons.
“In
the last few years my work has been a living hell and enough is
enough now... It has been a
long and tumultuous road with all sorts of stuff but I hope I have
left something for the world of conservation.”
Dr
Murphy acknowledged Mr Young's role in the night parrot's
rediscovery.
“John
has
my complete respect for the skill he demonstrated in finding the
bird; for his
openness in
sharing the experience with me; and for
the
maturity he
displayed
in
letting Bush Heritage and others get on with the job,”
Dr Murphy said.
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| The Night Parrot before release. Pic by Rachel Barr |
FEATURE
When a bird in the hand is really rare
It
was music to his ears. The high-pitched, melodic, haunting call of
the night parrot. When research scientist Steve Murphy analysed the
data from audio recorders he had in place across an arid hillside at
a secret location in south-west Queensland, he realised that no fewer
than four night parrots were calling at the same time.
Four
night parrots. That was the equivalent of the total number of human
encounters with this most enigmatic of birds over the previous 100
years. Murphy's work on the night parrot is emerging as one of the
most exciting developments in Australian natural history research in
recent decades.
The
curtain is being raised slowly on the ecology and habits of the Holy
Grail of Australia's birding world since Murphy and Bush Heritage
Australia revealed earlier this month that plans were advanced to
secure a 56,000ha reserve over the only site in the world where the
parrot is known from. At the time, Murphy released to The
Australian photographs and video footage of a netted night
parrot.
How
has the night parrot survived in this harsh landscape of gibber
plain, rocky outcrops and spinifex in Queensland's channel country,
south-west of Winton, when it has disappeared from the vast tract of
inland Australia it once inhabited? This weekend, Murphy is heading
interstate, to South Australia, to see if he can find more parrots.
It
was in north-east South Australia that the first specimen of the
night parrot was collected, in 1845 during the failed expedition led
by Charles Sturt to find Australia's mythical inland sea. And it was
in South Australia, in the 1870s and 1880s, that 16 of the 23 known
specimens of the bird were collected. The last living specimen was
collected in Western Australia in 1912.
Then
nothing more but a couple of brief sightings until a dead night
parrot was found in 1990, with a second dead bird picked up in 2006.
Both were in the same general region of south-west Queensland where
bushman John Young heard one calling in 2008. Then, in 2013, after
years of effort to track them down, Young revealed the first
photographs taken of a night parrot, at the site now being studied by
Murphy.
Murphy
believes the parrots have hung on at this site because of the
terrain, habitat and paucity of introduced predators. His research
has established that the birds favour large, old-growth clumps of
spinifex. Each bird has its own roost, buried deep within a spinifex
clump. The birds leave the roosts soon after sunset, travelling up to
7km during the night to feed.
From
sound recordings, Murphy has established that parrots favour certain
areas for roosting and other areas for feeding. “We were able to
get an idea of where the birds were moving to,” Murphy says. “There
was some predictability about their movements and habits.”
In
two years of research, Murphy has seen a total of three parrots,
including the one he netted and photographed with his partner, Rachel
Barr; this bird was seen twice subsequently, including once when it
flushed from its daytime roost, which contained a single feather.
“This is a bird that is extremely cryptic,” Murphy says.
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| Old-growth spinifex north-east of the Night Parrot site |
Most
of the parrots are within a 10km radius of John Young's discovery.
Murphy now backs away from his earlier estimate of the population at
between 10 and 30 birds. “It is impossible to say how many parrots
there are,” he concedes. He heard a night parrot 40km from the
site, suggesting that a second population may be present in the
region. Whatever the number, the known world population is miniscule.
The
parrot that was netted was unexpected. Murphy and Barr were at
opposite ends of a long mist net soon after sunset during the April
Easter weekend when it flew randomly into Barr's end of the net.
Netting during the previous three evenings was unproductive.
The
old-growth spinifex at the site was formerly widespread in other
areas previously frequented by the parrot. As long ago as 1925, the
collector Lawson Whitlock searched in vain for a year for the species
in one such area west of Alice Springs, where Aborigines had tracked
down “porcupine parrots” and cooked them on camp fires. Whitlock
described his search as the “most arduous I have undertaken”.
It
is likely that by Whitlock's time, the landscape of central Australia
was undergoing fundamental change that had dire implications for the
night parrot and
other arid zone wildlife.
Traditional Aborigines had for centuries conducted patchwork
burn-offs for various purposes, but the practice ceased with the
development of the grazing industry and European settlement.
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| Researchers at the Night Parrot site: Pic by Bush Heritage Australia |
Instead,
wildfires of
unprecedented intensity ravaged
vast areas intermittently. The
original habitat has gone and
is denied the opportunity to return.
The same problem
is evident in
the savannah woodlands of tropical Australia. The
carpentarian grasswren, a
small bird,
was once numerous in the sandstone screes
west of Borroloola in the Northern Territory;
as
a result of wildfire, the grasswren has vanished.
The
Queensland
region
frequented by
night parrots is home to other wildlife in decline elsewhere. The
endangered bilby is present; so
too is
the
biggest population
of bush stone-curlews
in outback Queensland. Murphy
believes the survival of the animals is linked to fire control and a
dearth of feral predators. The
landscape is markedly
broken compared to many
inland
areas;
unburnt
spinifex
clumps are
separated
by bare
rocky areas which may
keep the spread of fire in check.
Low
level grazing on the property appears to have had no adverse impact
on the parrots. Murphy
has not seen a fox or a cat at the site, although five cats have been
captured on the
30
camera traps
in place, which have failed to photograph a night parrot in
15,000 hours of operation.
“I carry a gun with me whenever I go out but I've never seen a
cat,” he says. “I've seen more night parrots than cats.”
Old-growth
spinifex
provides the parrots with
seemingly
effective refuge
from predators, which
are deterred by its prickly exterior.
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| Dingo at the Night Parrot site - Pic by Steve Murphy |
Murphy
believes the presence of dingos in the area is an important factor in
controlling cat numbers. The owners
of the 1 million-ha property where the parrots occur have
agreed not to cull dingoes as part of a management strategy being
implemented.
CSIRO
arid zone ecologist Chris Pavey agrees the presence of large, unburnt
spinifex patches
could
be keeping cat numbers in check and
the key to the parrot's survival.
“Mature spinifex allows animals to find refuge so it is likely to
be harder for cats to hunt,” Pavey says. “Each cat would need a
much larger home range than might be the case elsewhere. It's not too
far from this site to where 200 to 300 cats were being shot each
night not so long ago.”
With
feral cats in plague proportions elsewhere,
Murphy
regards the
felines
as the most
serious
threat
to the parrots. Cat
numbers
are increasing across much of northern Australia – the
population nationally is estimated at 20 million
-
with native wildlife populations crashing in recent years in
many places
as a result. Earlier this week, before heading to South Australia,
Murphy travelled to the parrot
site
with a team of sharp-shooters in search of cats and
to set traps.
Murphy
has amassed a substantial collection of night parrot calls on sound
recorders.
Playback of calls could
provide an
important
role
in detecting other night parrot populations; birds
may
reveal their presence by responding to random playback of their
calls.
The
recordings
are presently
under wraps
because the secrecy of the site is paramount while
efforts
to secure it
as
a reserve are
finalised.
However,
Murphy says they
will be made available to other researchers: “Nobody
argues
about the benefits of
doing that and it will be done.”
When
the
recordings are distributed,
efforts will be underway in earnest to find more night parrots,
hopefully
before
this
remarkable
species succumbs to the twin scourges
of wildfire and feral
cats.
