Night Parrot Comes Back From Extinction

When the lightning-induced wildfires tore through the region where the birds lived in 2020, it was feared that any remaining population had been destroyed. With the threat of the fires and increased encroachment on their habitat, a hail mary pass was initiated by conservationists to locate and protect any remaining night parrots.

The 50 birds now living in the Great Sandy Desert will now benefit from a fortified effort to protect them, now that their presence has been documented, and the night parrot could see a future as a flourishing species in the Ngururrpa Indigenous Protected Area and beyond. 

The Indigenous Desert Alliance held a survey to look for the rare birds, with Ngururrpa Rangers deploying camera traps and song meters in the Ngururrpa Indigenous Protected Area. They discovered not only a population of 50 night parrots but also active nests.

The study spanned three years, from 2020 to 2023, and found evidence of night parrots in 17 areas.

Part of the reason that night parrots are so elusive is that they’re nocturnal. During the day, they hide in dense, old-growth spinifex hummocks, making them very hard to spot. At night, the birds use the cover of darkness to hunt insects while avoiding predators.

When humans began to bring predators to the area, mainly feral cats, the population of night parrots dropped drastically.

Because the nocturnal creatures use the method of freezing in place to elude predators, who often use movement to hunt at night, they are especially vulnerable to cats, who are often not fooled by this trick.

With human introduction of feral cats into their habitat, night parrots became very rare, and were believed to be extinct by the 1890s.

The combination of a declining population and their nocturnal nature made night parrots so elusive that they were believed to be extinct for a hundred years until a single specimen was spotted in 1990.

Unfortunately, the specimen was dead, as was the next one found in 2006, but the specimens gave conservationists hope that there were still live night parrots living in the wild.

Then, in 2013, a small population of night parrots were discovered by a naturalist in Queensland, but there were only between 10 and 20 of them.

The new survey, which located 17 sites where night parrots were living and detected at least 50 living birds, is a success not only for the parrots but also for the people who found them.

The Indigenous Desert Alliance manages the wildland where the birds were found, and its Ngururrpa Rangers led the search for the elusive birds. Their discovery bolsters efforts to combine scientific study with indigenous knowledge systems to further conservation efforts.

Source: Ornithological Applications