At last there’s good news amid the doom and gloom surrounding falling numbers of Australian birds.
Two rare birds exclusive to King Island which were believed to be on the brink of extinction have been found alive and well, if in need of a population boost.
The news receiving wide coverage nationwide concerns the King Island scrubtit and the King Island thornbill. Previously, they had both been ranked as the Australian birds most likely to go extinct within 20 years. They are both in the top three of Australia’s most endangered birds, the third being the orange-bellied parrot.
The scrubtit and thornbill, each about the size of a ping-pong ball, live in dense swamps in the remoter parts of King Island. Trying to find them has been like trying to find a needle in a leech-infested haystack. Although previous attempts by researchers to study these little brown birds proved a challenge, a project funded by BirdLife Australia and the Tasmanian Government discovered new populations. Over a three-week period during last summer researchers from the Australian National University conducted more than 600 surveys using a new technique: repeated monitoring of the same area of habitat in short five-minute bursts.
The team was able to gather detailed information about where both birds live on the island, photograph them and capture audio recordings of their songs.
Across the island, scrubtits have been found at more than 60 different sites, and thornbills at more than 20 locations. Brown thornbills were even detected on private land away from the only previously known population.
“We had thought that the birds were confined to one forest patch and this new discovery means the populations of both are larger than first thought,” said Dr Jenny Lau, manager of the program to prevent extinctions at BirdLife Australia. “Although they still remain endangered birds, this discovery gives us all hope for these birds’ futures.”
Now the birds have been found, a plan is being put in place to ensure their survival. The BirdLife team will be back on King Island in a few weeks.
The good news about the King Island birds follows another positive story, this one regarding the orange-bellied parrot.
Premier Will Hodgman announced earlier this year that during the summer there had been increased numbers of fledglings produced at the only know breeding site of the critically-endangered parrot, at Melaleuca in the far south-west.
Under the state government’s $2.5m orange-bellied parrot program, aimed at improving both the captive and wild populations, the number of wild fledglings recorded increased from 33 to 36. Twenty OPBs returned to breed at Melaleuca, up from 19 last season, including 13 males, six females and one of unknown gender. Captive-born fledglings increased to 81 this year, up from 60 last season following the increased breeding capacity at a new breeding facility at Five Mile Beach. Forty-four were released during the program’s spring releases last year, up from 23 in 2017. In addition to spring releases, the program also released 12 captive-bred juveniles at Melaleuca during February.