Endemic Tasmanian Birds

This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! ’E’s expired and gone to meet ’is maker! ‘E's a stiff! Bereft of life, ’e rests in peace! The life and times of the swift parrot reads like a Monty Python script, the sort of thing that featured in the off-beat comedy team’s dead parrot sketch. The researchers and conservationists battling to save the parrot do not see the funny side, however, especially as the bird in 2016 was listed as critically endangered. It’s only a … [Read more...] about Swift parrot

Although I had lived in Tasmania for nearly 20 years, I never laid eyes on one of the world’s rarest wild birds, the orange-bellied parrot, until late 2016. I had often stood on the runway at Cambridge Airport in Hobart waving off birding friends on their jaunt to see the parrot, but I’d never been tempted to join them. I had not wanted to be a classed as a twitcher, flying in to the well-established feeding stations to see the parrot without any effort, to tick it off on … [Read more...] about Orange-bellied parrot

A bird in the hand is better than a bird in the bush, as the saying goes, and I had a wry smile on my face, looking at a forty-spotted pardalote in the cup of my palm. I had set off to find the forty-spot, which is confined to just a few stretches of gum woodlands in Tasmania, and here I was holding a bird retrieved from the mist-net used to catch it. The location was north Bruny Island, the main stronghold of the pardalote, and my services had been enlisted by a … [Read more...] about Forty-spotted pardalote

Far away, the Summer Olympics in Rio were in progress but a little closer to home I revelled in my own version of the green and gold. The silver wattles – closely related to the golden wattle, the Australian floral emblem which inspires our sporting colours – had burst into flower somewhere between the exploits of our swimmers and the start of the athletics program which followed. And like an Aussie athlete striking gold, I had my own triumphant moment when I caught … [Read more...] about Green rosella

Like the dusky robin, another Tasmanian endemic species to fly back in time is the Tasmanian scrubwren. It might appear an unobtrusive, nervous little bird – quick to flee from approaching footsteps on a mountain trail – but its buzzing alarm call echoes back to a time when it aided and abetted those most feared in the fledgling colony. The scrubwren made its home among the bushrangers, the murderers and thieves who terrorised Tasmania’s citizens in the Victorian era. The … [Read more...] about Tasmanian scrubwren