Ellen Phiddian
Cosmos science journalist
After a century of presumed extinction, the ground dwelling Australian night parrot was revealed a decade ago to not be gone at all – just vanishingly, hauntingly rare.
Researchers and Traditional Owners have caught glimpses of night parrots in Queensland and Western Australia (WA), but their numbers are heavily diminished from their 19th Century peaks. There are fewer than 100 birds making up the total known population.
Now, a 3-year survey by Indigenous rangers and ecologists has greatly expanded that number. They’ve published their discovery in Wildlife Research.
The team says it’s found evidence of at least 50 night parrots living in the Ngururrpa Indigenous Protected Area (IPA). The IPA lies in the Great Sandy Desert in northeast WA, on the border with the Northern Territory.
Ngururrpa rangers and ecologists used songmeters – acoustic recorders – to trace night parrot calls across the IPA.
“The rangers used their knowledge of Country and habitats, food and water resources to know where to put the songmeters and have been really successful in getting a lot of calls,” co-author Dr Rachel Paltridge, an ecologist at the Indigenous Desert Alliance, tells Cosmos.
The team detected night parrot calls at 17 of 31 sites where they’d placed songmeters.
“But in addition to that, we also hear them ourselves out at our camp, and on a recent trip, the rangers were really thrilled to have a night parrot land in their camp. They saw it really clearly,” says Paltridge.
“We’ve even found nests and eggs.”
Previous research on the Queensland population has shown that night parrots prefer to roost in a specific type of spinifex grass – Triodia longiceps.
“The rangers call it lanu lanu. That species isn’t the dominant spinifex out there. It’s just in certain geology types,” says Paltridge.
“So we can use geology mapping and satellite imagery to map where this old growth lanu lanu spinifex is.”
The team found more than 50 patches across the Ngururrpa IPA, and surveyed 31 of these sites with songmeters recording for at least 3 weeks at a time.
They identified individual bird calls on the recordings with the help of night parrot expert Dr Nick Leseberg, an ecologist at the University of Queensland.
“At one site, we’ve had up to 5 different birds,” says Paltridge.
“We think some sites have only got 1-2.”
The team can’t be certain with this method, but they believe they’ve recorded up to 30 individual birds. Since they’ve surveyed a portion of the possible habitat, this means they estimate at least 50 night parrots are living across the whole area.
“There could well be more than 50,” says Paltridge.
The large night parrot population is threatened by fire and feral predation – the original villains of night parrot decline – but work is already in place to protect them.
“Up until now, most of the detailed research on night parrots had been conducted on that small population in Queensland that’s been studied for the last 10 years,” says Paltridge.
“There hasn’t been much at all published on birds in Western Australia, which is actually where most of the birds occur.”
The landscape in WA presents different challenges to Queensland.
“In the Great Sandy Desert, fire is so much more prevalent than in Queensland, because we have hundreds of kilometres of country covered in spinifex, which is so flammable,” says Paltridge.
Megafires, started by lightning, can destroy vast areas of habitat.
“In these really remote, inaccessible places where there’s nothing to stop fire, they can go forever. But where you’ve got rangers looking after country, fire management is a really important part of their work,” says Paltridge.
“The Ngururrpa rangers have been doing both ground and aerial burning over the last few years, since they got their Indigenous Protected Area established [in 2020]. And prior to that, people did traditional burning.”
Since finding night parrot habitats, the Indigenous Desert Alliance has been helping to coordinate burning that protects their roosts.
“We’ve got really good fire history information, so we know the ages of the fuels in all the different places, and we can strategically make fire breaks around the night parrot roosting habitat,” says Paltridge.
“Thank goodness, because there’s always lightning strikes. Last year, one of our good sites was unfortunately burnt by fire started by lightning. But because all this burning had been done around it, that fire only burnt out one site.”
The area is also threatened by feral cats. The team recommends baiting methods that avoid harming dingos, like Felixer targeters, to manage these.
“In quite a lot of sandy spinifex country, where there’s hardly any kangaroos, no rabbits, no cattle carrion, the feral cat is now the biggest mammal out there for dingoes to prey on,” says Paltridge.
“So they eat a lot of feral cats. There’s hardly any trees for the cats to go up. Cats don’t have much stamina, so dingoes can chase them down and catch them. And 15% of the dingo scats in this area had feral cat fur and claws in them.”
Paltridge says that the night parrot discovery confirms the importance of Indigenous ranger management on Country.
“It’s really important that that management is done by people who have such a great understanding of the country and really care about all the plants and animals,” she says.
“We are still looking for them, to make sure they are safe, and we are still finding them,” writes Ngururrpa ranger Clifford Sunfly in the paper.
