The orange-bellied parrot is important in ways we may never know until too late.
There is no petition to save the orange-bellied parrot. In newspapers and on television, there are no editorials about it, no columns by learned scientists or politicians. There are no products to boycott to help ensure its survival and no companies to badger or demand accountability from. There is, apparently, nobody to blame.
The birds don't have the ''wow'' factor of the orang-utan, the cuddliness of a fellow native, the koala, or the political overtones of the anti-duck shooting campaign. A small, nervous bird that even experts find hard to see will never be an easy sell in a conservation-crowded market.
Nevertheless, its looming extinction is a wretched natural disaster. Australia's orange-bellied parrot is ranked with the giant panda and Siberian tiger as among the rarest and most endangered of wildlife.
Once upon a time, it was sought after for the caged-bird trade and it is easy to see why. Despite its name, the orange-bellied parrot is multicoloured. Its body is a dazzling grass green, its wing edges and forehead blue, its face and breast yellow-green. The eponymous red-orange blotch is tucked beneath its legs in the centre of its bright yellow abdomen.
I am one of the lucky few to have seen this pretty bird in the wild and later this month will be looking for it again. Along with dozens of volunteers across coastal Victoria and eastern South Australia, I will be surveying the bird's known haunts, adding to 20 years of data on its whereabouts and habitat.
Here is what we are hoping to find: a small, green bird feeding on the seeds of reddish-green glasswort. It has a distinctive ''zzt'' alarm call described as ''marbles rustling''. We will have to scour the saltmarsh for traces of it, though. Last summer, parrot numbers that had previously been estimated at 140 were revised down to 50.
With this grim news, Environment Minister Peter Garrett offered a small sop to researchers in a grant of $260,000 to carry out the latest stage of a rehabilitation plan.
There are small signs of hope. The recovery team chairman, ecologist Peter Menkhorst, insists there are several examples worldwide where endangered bird species have been brought back from the brink thanks to intensive management.
A captive breeding program began in 1984 and now has 165 birds, all closely related. Young, wild birds will be caught to make the captive population more genetically robust.
The yellow-bellied parrot is migratory, spending winter on the mainland and summer breeding in Tasmania. Captive-bred bird releases have so far exceeded researchers' expectations, with birds released near Werribee identified in Tasmania by their leg bands. In April, birdwatchers also sighted three birds at Werribee's Western Treatment Plant, just west of Melbourne. The first winter survey in May identified six across Victoria and South Australia.
But forebodingly, in April, minister Garrett confirmed that at current rates of decline, the species would be extinct in three to five years.
In addition, Birds Australia, the foremost community bird conservation organisation, has ceased research on the parrot because of a new drive by Garrett's office to cut funding for individual species, in favour of a ''landscape and ecosystem approach'' to conservation.
The UN's Global Biodiversity Outlook warned in May that we are losing biodiversity at an unprecedented rate, and that this poses a risk even to crops and clean water.
In this light, dwindling numbers of a bird as short-statured as a paperback and weighing as little as two matchboxes may seem inconsequential. But this species is important, in ways we may never know until too late.
With the federal government's lack of political will on whaling in Antarctic waters and the capitulation to the duck-shooting lobby in Premier John Brumby's new Murray River Park, we're looking more and more like people that don't give a stuffed dead parrot about conservation.
Debbie Lustig is a Melbourne writer and birdwatcher.