We’ve just completed crossing the Great Victoria Desert from east to west along
the Anne Beadell Highway from Coober Pedy through to W.A., looking for Princess
Parrots among other things. Despite the GVD being the most reliable area for
Princess Parrots in the last few years (judging by Atlas records, and recent
findings in the Jupiter Well area notwithstanding) they are still very hard to
come by through there.
We took the route very slowly, especially through the Mamungari (formerly
Unnamed) Conservation Park and adjacent WA/SA border area, which is where most
recent PP sightings have occurred. Nevertheless, we failed to find any parrots
until near the end of our trip, in the Neale Junction Nature Reserve, where the
Anne Beadell and Connie Sue highways cross. Here we had 6-10 Princess Parrots.
On 10th Sept we very briefly had a pair fly over the vehicle flying WNW at the
unexpected time of 1410, just west of the old landing strip at about 28d 18m
20s S, 126d 01m 30s E.
We camped at the nice new DEC campground (28d 18m 11.9s S, 125d 48m 52.3s E)
about 200m west of Neale Junction proper, and early on the morning of 11th Sept
had a beautiful flock of six Princess Parrots fly very close and low WNW right
over our camp at 0657. We searched for them to the west of the campground, and
at 0757 Jon had a pair give excellent views as they flew south in the vicinity
of 28d 18m 01.9s S, 125d 46m 46.2s E (about 3.5km west of Neale Junction).
We camped in the area again, but there was no sign of parrots at all the
following morning in any of these areas (which seems quite typical of the
species, based on our experiences this year).
We had Scarlet-chesteds in a couple of spots in Mamungari, although we were not
expressly looking for them (for example we never camped in or near mature
mallee). We saw enormous tracts of severely burned (formerly mature) mallee, so
presumably SCP has declined significantly in areas of the GVD in the last
decade or so, which is not encouraging.
Cheers, Jon and Anne King.
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