Six Australian birds you may never have heard of … and may not be heard from again
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Loading... - Jeffrey McKay
- 02 Dec 2021
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There seems to be a perversity to human nature, in that we don’t really care about wild creatures until there are so few left that we can put a name to them. Think Martha, the last passenger pigeon, or the haunting images of Benjamin the last thylacine, pacing around its cage at Hobart zoo in 1936.
The Action Plan for Australian Birds 2020 (released this week by CSIRO Publishing) bandies a lot of names of birds you may never have heard of, which are now classified as on the path to extinction – 214 to be exact, around one in six of Australia’s bird species and subspecies. It can all be too much to take in. So here is a guide to six birds of which there are so few left in the wild that we could easily remember them all if they had individual names.
Mukarrthippi grasswren
While there are several birds, such as Coxen’s fig-parrot or the Tiwi hooded robin, that we can’t unequivocally prove still exist, the candidate for the lowest population of any Australian bird that we can count is this obscure little bird that streaks between spiky clumps of spinifex in a small area of mallee in the Cobar shire of western NSW.
Only officially identified in 2020 as a distinct subspecies of the more widespread striated grasswren (itself a threatened bird), the Mukkarthippi grasswren (pronounced mook-wah-tippy and meaning small bird of the spinifex in the local Ngiyampaa language) has only three or four pairs definitely known to survive and a total estimated population of not more than 20 birds.
Norfolk Island morepork
This small owl got as near to extinction as is possible to go, with only one female bird left on the entire island by 1988. The introduction of some males of its closest relative, the New Zealand morepork, saw a hybrid population develop to the extent that by 2019 there were thought to be between 25 and 50 birds on the island. However, only four pairs were known and since 2008 there have only been two successful breeding events observed. It is feared that most of the remaining birds are too old to breed, though the successful rearing of two chicks in 2019 gives some cause for hope.
Northern eastern bristlebird
While the southern subspecies of the eastern bristlebird has responded well to active conservation measures, its northern cousin has not been so lucky. In 2020 only 43 birds were known to exist, though a couple more may have been seen since then. This was up from a maximum of 30 reported in the 2010 action plan. It was feared all these gains were at risk in the 2019-20 bushfires, as these poor flyers often succumb to intense, large fires. (Though they do benefit from regular, small-intensity burns.) Fortunately, it seems the fires missed almost all remaining birds and the northern eastern bristlebird lives to scurry through the undergrowth another day. Read More…
