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.

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