The largest known population of night parrots -- around 50 birds -- is believed to live in a remote indigenous protected area in western Australia. But the bird's future is uncertain -- with the possibility of the first piece of industrial development in the area, on the horizon. Rachel Paltridge from the indigenous desert alliance -- is hopeful the proposed development won't affect the parrot population.
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00:00Night parrots are very rare, one of the rarest animals in Australia.
00:07There's thought to be somewhere between 100 and 250 of them spread across the desert across
00:12several states, but yeah, the population that we've been studying on the Naropa Indigenous
00:17Protected Area is thought to be at least 50 birds, so that's pretty encouraging.
00:22We've had, so I'm working with the Naropa Rangers out there, and they've had camera
00:26traps set through the night parrot habitat, and they've found that dingoes are the most
00:32commonly detected predators out there, 10 times as often as we see cats and foxes.
00:39We've also been collecting predator scats and looking at what dingoes have been eating,
00:43and we're turning up cat remains really regularly in those dingo scats, so about 15% of the
00:48dingo scats have contained cat hair and claws.
00:53We've also seen photos of dingoes with cats in their mouth walking through the night parrot
00:57habitat, so we've got several lines of evidence that dingoes are killing a lot of cats, which
01:02are thought to be a major predator for the night parrot.
01:05We've been lucky to have funding from the National Environmental Science Program, which
01:08has allowed us to build partnerships between scientists and Indigenous rangers to work
01:13on these threatened species projects, and it's enabled us to do it in a really two-way
01:17science way.
01:21We've combined the knowledge of the rangers, they've got fantastic knowledge of their country,
01:26where their habitats are, where the night parrots roost, where the good feeding grounds
01:30are, where the water points are, and we've combined this with the latest and greatest
01:35science and technology, where we use satellite imagery, fire scar mapping, and geology maps,
01:42and we use these sound recorders to actually look for the night parrots, because they're
01:45so cryptic and hard to find, so we need to use this technology to actually find them.
01:50Of course, there's always risks with any new developments in an area that has remained
01:54really pristine and undeveloped forever.
01:57I guess one of the impacts that I'm worried about is maybe spreading weeds through the
02:02IPA, the Indigenous Protected Area, with the new road going in, so the mining company will
02:08need to be really vigilant about that, and the rangers will need to monitor it, but on
02:12the positive side, I guess it gives the rangers better access to their country to be able
02:17to do their fire management and feral animal control, and I think what this study has really
02:21confirmed is the importance of having people on country doing that fire management, doing
02:26that cat control in a way that doesn't harm dingoes, so hopefully it'll all work out.
02:32Some of the night parrots are close to the road, but we've found 17 sites across a huge
02:36area, 100km by 150km, so a lot of them are a long way from the road.