by John Elder, September 30,
2007
The last night parrot seen in the wild was a
headless corpse. The remains, found last year in a Queensland national park,
looked like an over-sized budgerigar: similar markings and shape but a stumpier
tail.
Of course, budgies live in cages whereas the night parrot - known as the
Tasmanian tiger of the sky - has been flirting with oblivion on the harsh plains
of inland Australia since the 1880s.
It was first thought extinct in 1915. What makes the headless corpse all the
more pitiful is that it could well mean the white flag finally going up for the
species.
There's only one bird officially listed as becoming extinct on the mainland
since European settlement and that's the paradise parrot, dead by the 1920s.
The night parrot will be the second once the "remaining undiscovered
populations wink out", says Professor Stephen Garnett of Charles Darwin
University and chairman of Bird Australia's threatened species committee.
"We've been very lucky so far compared with other countries," says the
professor, speaking of Australia's low extinction rate of birds, which includes
eight species lost from our territorial islands. But the luck's running out
fast.
In a paper he co-wrote, to be published next month, The history of threatened
birds in Australia and its offshore islands , Professor Garnett makes a long
list of disturbing predictions as to the viability of our bird life because of
feral species running amok, human sprawl and climate change.
The paper predicts 45 Australian bird species will be threatened to some
degree by increases in temperature by 2050. Already the wedge-tailed shearwater
is struggling to feed itself because waters of the Barrier Reef are getting too
warm to sustain its diet of fish, squid and crustaceans.
The impact of climate change, long predicted, "is now starting to show an
impact on numbers", says Professor Garnett.
The fairy tern has all but disappeared from Victoria and South Australia as a
breeding bird because of the salinity killing the fish they feed on, and the
mismanagement of river flows destroying their nests. In the Coorong and Murray
lakes region, the fairy tern's stronghold breeding ground, nests have been
flooded during rises in the water level, while foxes have gained access to nests
when water levels have fallen. Along the Younghusband Peninsula shoreline near
the mouth of the Murray, foxes have destroyed 95 per cent of nests in the past
two years.
Based on a report from Professor Garnett's committee, Birds Australia
recently recommended the World Conservation Union (IUCN) list the fairy tern as
vulnerable on its "red list", which ranks a species' risk of winking out
forever.
The Mallee emu-wren - a tiny bird weighing less than seven grams - has lost
more than half its population in the past 10 years in South Australia and
Victoria because of bushfires and drought. Birds Australia has recommended the
IUCN list the Mallee emu-wren as endangered.
The recommendation came too late to be included in the most recent red list,
released two weeks ago. The Australian mainland now has only two birds on the
list ranked a few heartbeats from extinction or critically endangered (CE): the
night parrot and the orange-bellied parrot of which 140 remain at large around
Port Phillip Bay and Gippsland.
However, the number of birds headed for CE status - including more parrots -
will multiply in the next few years, among them Baudin's black-cockatoo,
Carnaby's black-cockatoo and the Australasian bittern.
Source:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/byebye-birdies-45-species-feeling-the-heat/2007/09/29/1190486630635.html
