December 2021 marks a tragic anniversary in the bird world. A century ago nature-lovers were given hope that one of the most beautiful birds known to Australia was flying free and had not succumbed to extinction as had been feared.
Although the paradise parrot had vanished from view about 20 years previously, a birdwatcher reported in December 1921 seeing a pair of the birds in cattle country inland of the south-eastern Queensland coast.
What’s more, Cyril Jerrard followed up the sighting with pictures of the birds a month later.
The pictures were not only the first photographic record of the species but marked another first – never before had a photograph of an Australian bird been accepted as proof of its existence. Incredibly, evidence of the existence of a rare species prior to this was only confirmed by shooting a specimen and preserving it by taxidermy.
The shooting of paradise parrots for display in glass cabinets and the demands of the caged-bird trade had taken a toll on its numbers following its discovery on the Darling Downs of New South Wales in 1845. It also suffered loss of habitat and disturbance by ranching and farming. Fire regimes implemented by the Aborigines for thousands of years become more frequent and extensive under European management, possibly exposing the parrot’s nesting sites. The species nested in tunnels in anthills. Because of this, it was also called the anthill parrot.
Despite the sighting of a nesting pair of birds, they failed to produce young and vanished after the breeding season. There were sporadic sightings of birds in nearby areas but before long the species was lost completely.
The paradise parrot remains the only mainland Australian bird to become extinct.
The 100th anniversary of the re-emergence and then loss of the parrot comes at a time when two other Australian parrots are fighting for survival. These, the orange-bellied parrot and the swift parrot, nest in Tasmania and are the only parrots in the world known to migrate, both travelling to the south-east mainland in winter.
Complex and expensive conservation programs are in place for the critically-endangered Tasmanian parrots, measures that, if put in place at the right time, might have saved the paradise parrot.
But in the 1920s the strategy of captive-breeding and establishing protective zones around nests free of feral predators was in its infancy.
The paradise parrot’s premature end a century ago, meanwhile, remains prescient today when it comes to how best to protect other threatened Australian avian species.
Along with Jerrard’s photographs, all that remains of the parrots are stuffed specimens in museums. A study of these reveals a stunningly beautiful bird, mixing greens and various shades of red in its plumage.
Alec Chisholm, a campaigning ornithologist and a pioneering nature writer, had searched over many years for the bird himself before being sent Jerrard’s pictures. He wrote finally that the parrot’s “fatal gift of beauty” had led to its demise.