Rare and Elusive Australian Bird, Once Thought Extinct for 100 Years, Discovered by Indigenous Rangers and Scientists

The night parrot—a brilliantly colored, nocturnal bird—once thrived in Australia’s outback. The arrival of colonists and feral predators, however, brought about an almost catastrophic decline in the species’s population in the late 19th century. In fact, the vibrant, green parrots were believed to be extinct for roughly a century, until one of them was found in western Queensland in 1990.

While that was heartening for scientists, there was one problem: The specimen was dead. Then, another dead night parrot was identified 16 years later. It wasn’t until 2013 that a naturalist found a small, living population in southwestern Queensland. Since then, the species’s known population has been in the tens of birds, and the night parrot remains one of the most elusive—and most endangered—birds on Earth.

Now, however, a team of Indigenous rangers and scientists has discovered as many as 50 night parrots on land managed by the Ngururrpa people in Western Australia’s Great Sandy Desert. The new results from their project, which is supported by the Indigenous Desert Alliance with funding from the Australian National Environmental Science Program’s Resilient Landscapes Hub, were published in the journal Wildlife Research on Monday.

“We the Ngururrpa Rangers have been looking for night parrots since 2019. First, we thought they were only living in one area, on our neighbor’s country, but then we started checking in our area and ended up finding evidence that they are here,” Clifford Sunfly, a Ngururrpa ranger and co-author of the study, says in a statement. “We are still looking for them, to make sure they are safe, and we are still finding them.”

Night parrots are generally difficult to detect—a fact that has been long recorded in Indigenous culture. The elusive species creates tunnels and nests in dense spinifex bushes and emerges at night to forage for seeds. Spotting such a creature has been called the “Holy Grail of birdwatching.”

During their work, the rangers found physical evidence of night parrots, including feathers and nests with eggs, and they “knew it was a good sign,” Rudi Maxwell writes for NITV. One even landed in their camp one night, an encounter that put the witnesses among the special group of fewer than 30 people who had seen a live night parrot in the last 100 years.

The new breakthrough, though, came from sound data. Rangers used their knowledge of the environment to narrow down the parrot’s vast habitat to 31 potential roosting areas, where the team then placed sound recorders to listen for its distinctive calls, which include “whistles, croaks and bell-like sounds,” the team writes for the Conversation.

“The acoustic data we gathered was then analyzed to extract any bird calls in the night parrot’s frequency range. Potential detections were verified using a reference library of known night parrot calls,” the scientists add in the Conversation. They successfully identified night parrot calls in 17 of the 31 sites they had chosen, ten of which were determined to be roost sites, since the calls sounded shortly after sunset and before sunrise.

One of the night parrot’s diverse array of calls sounded like “didly dip, didly dip,” like a telephone, as study co-author Nick Leseberg, an ecologist at the University of Queensland, tells the Guardian’s Petra Stock. Another sounded like “dink dink,” resembling a bell.

The team hypothesized the distribution of night parrots and the birds’ general population size by counting the number of different calls, because individuals are thought to have unique vocalizations. Researchers also took into account the volume of the call, which helps determine the location it came from. They then extrapolated these results across 58 potential habitats in the area and estimated up to 20 roosting sites may be active there, hosting a predicted total of between 40 and 50 birds.

This makes the Ngururrpa Indigenous Protected Area population the largest known congregation of night parrots, since the known population in Queensland contains no more than 20 birds, per the Guardian.

Having identified the night parrots by sound, the team moved on to studying threats to the endangered species using camera traps. They found that dingoes were the most present predators in the area—but the large, wild dogs were busy eating feral cats, which the team suspects are the real key predators of night parrots. So dingoes, they suggest, are actually protecting the night parrot population.

Satellite imagery helped determine that lightning-caused bushfires pose a great threat to the parrots in the Great Sandy Desert. The rangers already conduct strategic land burning to manage that risk, but the new data could help them tailor their plan to protect roosting sites. Night parrots also benefit from a lack of human development in their environment, so the team argues remote habitats should be kept unindustrialized.

In fact, the Great Sandy Desert “is probably one of the world’s most uninfluenced ecosystems when it comes to industrial-level footprints,” James Watson, a biogeographer at the University of Queensland who was not involved in the study, tells the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Peter de Kruijff.

“It’s these large, intact places that allow species to adapt to a changing climate, because they’ve got big, healthy populations that can move through the landscape,” he adds.

Urgent action is needed to protect the newly discovered night parrot population, the scientists write in the Conversation, and to “ensure the night parrot doesn’t go missing a second time, perhaps for good.”

Editors' note, September 30, 2024: This article has been updated to correct a mischaracterization of the rangers’ encounter with a night parrot a few years ago, in which they saw it but did not photograph it. The article has also been updated to note that the research project was supported by the Indigenous Desert Alliance.

Margherita Bassi | READ MORE

Margherita Bassi is a freelance journalist and trilingual storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel, Discover magazine, Live Science, Atlas Obscura and Hidden Compass.