Welcome to the Friends of the Western Ground Parrot Newsletter
No. 74
Get up-to-date information about the latest efforts to save this critically endangered parrot unique to Western Australia
New hopes - Joy is courting Fifi again
DEPARTMENT OF PARKS AND WILDLIFE SUMMER 2016/17 UPDATE
by Sarah Comer & Deon Utber
The Parks and Wildlife team has been busy over the past few months: organising field monitoring trips, monitoring for the autumn cat baiting, working on improving our analysis of Automated Recording Units (ARUs) and planning for the future. The heavy rains that affected the south coast in February were the start of a series of events that delayed ground parrot monitoring trips, and we appreciated the patience and flexibility of volunteers in rescheduling. To date only the Cape Arid National Park trip to Pasley has been completed, with low numbers of birds heard, as the trip planned for Poison Creek was postponed after heavy rain resulted in roads into Cape Arid being closed. As a result, there will be a few spots freed up for Poison Creek, so if you are interested please let us know. A ‘tag-along’ style trip to the Nuytsland Nature Reserve is planned for May this year (subject to the weather of course) and while some volunteers are confirmed there may be capacity for a few more.
In February Allan Burbidge and Abby Berryman represented the recovery team at the inaugural meeting of the Australasian Ecoacoustic Chapter. South Coast NRM kindly supported our participation in this event, which was particularly useful in the discussions of developing acoustic recognisers for scanning field recordings (one of our biggest challenges is getting through the analysis of the large volume of data collected by ARUs). Further support for ARU technology has also been provided by the Friends of the Western Ground Parrot through the purchase and donation of 10 sets of new microphones to replace old and damaged ARU componentry.
We realised that many readers may not have met, or know all of the staff involved in ground parrot recovery efforts, so plan to introduce one or two of the team in upcoming newsletters. Our two senior technical officers are Jeff Pinder and Saul Cowen (pictured below)
Jeff Pinder with Paul Wettin in the background Saul Cowan in Cape Arid National Park
Jeff has worked on the Western Ground Parrot recovery project in its various incarnations for the past 10 years. Jeff says, “The variety of the work is something that stands out for me as a strong motivational force. Whether it is standing in the half-light of a remote expanse of coastal heath listening for ground parrots or bouncing around on rough ground on a quad bike for days on end or setting up field cameras with garden canes and turkey feathers or sorting through cat litter to collect and store lures. Or liaising with the community to recruit volunteers or scanning a computer screen trawling through thousands of hours of bird call recordings or trapping, handling and measuring wild populations of native animals or bush-bashing through thick scrub surveying for noisy scrub-birds or rescuing stranded dolphins. Or remote camping for weeks of the year with no facilities or four wheel driving on varying terrain in contrasting but awe-inspiring landscapes or hanging out of a helicopter radio-tracking collared feral cat or collecting tissue samples from dead animals or shopping for 15 people in the local supermarket or cleaning rusty, soiled cat traps or catching ground parrots for the zoo. These are the things that keep me coming back for more.
And the further joy of this variety is that these tasks are all key, inter-connecting pieces of a jigsaw to save threatened species. Because sometimes as a technical officer in the thick of the action the various tasks can seem like diversions from one another. To know otherwise gives me strength and confidence that we are having a meaningful and positive impact on biodiversity values in our region”.
Saul has also been a long-standing team member, having first been exposed to the joys of working as a volunteer on a ground parrot trip to the Fitzgerald River National Park back in 2004. In his own words: “After completing my Bachelor’s in Zoology in the UK, I have spent the last nine years working with Western Ground Parrots and other threatened fauna on the South Coast of WA, including the completion of my PhD on the genetics of the Noisy Scrub-bird.
It is an immense privilege to work in some of the most beautiful and biologically important parts of Australia, alongside such a talented and dedicated team. The work that we do is helping secure a future for the Western Ground Parrot and many other species around the state, and for me that is the most exciting part of this job”.
Volunteer opportunities for Western Ground Parrot surveys
Cape Arid National Park 3 - 7 April weather permitting. Volunteers need to be able to meet the team from the Dept of Parks and Wildlife on Monday at 2pm in Esperance. Please contact the department directly: Lucy.Clausen@dpaw.wa.gov.au/ Tel: 08 9842 4517
Nuytsland Nature Reserve
15 – 25 May (participants need to be self-sufficient and provide their own 4WD, fuel, food & water)
Balladonia Track
June (date to be announced) participants need to be self-sufficient and provide their own 4WD, fuel, food and water.
Please note that whilst the Balladonia Track survey is not going to be accompanied by staff from the Department of Parks and Wildlife, all volunteers need to be registered with the department and will also have to undergo an induction by the department prior to going into the field. Dave Taylor from our organisation is likely to lead this trip which is expected to be about a week long.
Thanks to a grant from BirdLife Australia we can provide a subsidy to help cover participants travel costs.
Please contact us if you want to register your interest or need more information.
The Western Ground Parrot documentary Secrets at Sunrise is nearing completion. Award-winning composer Ash Gibson-Greig has started to write the music for the documentary and Perth-born actress Roz Hammond, known from films such as Muriel's Wedding, has just been contracted to do the narration.
Filmmaker Jennene Riggs has recently decided to extend the running time of the documentary to make it easier to enter it at film festivals. The decision to change the length of the documentary from a one-hour long program to a feature-length documentary meant additional work which has resulted in a slight delay. We have just sent a request to the State Natural Resource Program which has generously provided substantial funding for the documentary to allow for the completion date of Secrets at Sunrise to be changed to 30 April so it can be finished without any compromises to the quality.
UPDATE FROM PERTH ZOO by Arthur Ferguson
Summer has now come to an end and with this brings the completion of moult and commencement of forward planning for the upcoming breeding season. During moult the birds typically present as being less active and less vocal. The vegetation growth and habitat within the aviaries is excellent and the birds are well settled. General aviary maintenance in the form of pruning of plants, cleaning of roost sites, removal of moulted feathers, and fine tuning adjustments of CCTV cameras has recently been completed.
Fifi in moult on 12 Jan 2017
(Editor's note: The image below the headline depicts Fifi nearing completion of moult on 25 Feb)
A new garden bed has recently been set-up to enable the cultivation of seed to provide the birds with fresh green seed heads to further enhance their diet.
In late February, Joy started showing signs of breeding condition developing with the onset of display behaviours and to our surprise he commenced mate feeding Fifi on the 6th March. This has so far continued once per day in the morning, a total of six times. The onset of mate feeding is likely the result of the excellent conditions within the aviary, combined with favourable weather conditions and we will continue to monitor the birds closely to see what might unfold from here.
Chairperson Anne Bondin at our stall at the Porongurup Wine Festival which was kindly sponsored by Wendy Diletti fromCastle Rock Estate WinesThe festival which was held on the Labour Day Long Weekend attracted plenty of interest with many people stopping at our stall. As usual quite a few of them confessed that they had actually never heard of a Western Ground Parrot before.
Photo credit: Paul Wettin
Greetings cards for sale
You can help us raise funds by purchasing this lovely greeting card. It is available for sale for $2 plus postage. Please contact us if you want to purchase some cards.
The artwork was created by Western Australian artist Daniela Pessotto-Robba.
Citizen Scientists at work
At the South Coast Festival of Birds in March we teamed up with Sarah Comer from the Dept. of Parks and Wildlife and provided festival goers with the opportunity to learn more about Western Ground Parrot monitoring. Participants headed out to the coastal heathlands near Cheyne Beach and set up automated recording units and also spent an evening listening in habitat formerly occupied by the birds, but none were heard.
photo credit: S Comer / Parks & Wildlife
CHIRPINGS FROM THE CHAIR
Anne Bondin
Western Australia has a new government. At this stage we do not know what, if any, impact this will have on the conservation of the Western Ground Parrot. Prior to the state election we contacted all major parties as well as their candidates for the seats of Albany, Roe and Kalgoorlie and informed them about the plight of the Western Ground Parrot. Several candidates responded and assured us of their support for the bird should they be elected. We are about to write to the new Minister for the Environment to seek his support for conservation measures benefiting the Western Ground Parrot including the continued employment of key staff involved in the recovery project whose contracts are about to run out.
With the recent release of the Threatened Species Prospectus by the federal Minister for the Environment it has become clear that the government is looking for new ways to fund the battle to prevent further extinctions. Business and philanthropic interests have been invited to work with government and conservation groups and contribute to proposed projects listed in the prospectus. The document is available for download from the following website (the proposal for the Western Ground Parrot is listed on page 79):
Please note that the lead partner for the project proposal will apparently be the Department of Parks and Wildlife. We are going to sit down with the partners named in the proposal to come up with ideas how to encourage business and potential donors to become involved.
Whilst I welcome the idea of government engaging the wider community to get involved in bringing our threatened species back from the brink, I do wonder where the funding for all the important projects listed in the prospectus will come from if donations from private sources are not sufficient to make them happen. Will the government bridge the gap? I would hope so, given that the funds mobilised by the federal government in support of threatened species since 2014 has only been $210 million according to the Threatened Species Commissioner.
We have recently pledged to cover the costs of a software license to enable the Department of Parks and Wildlife to trial Kaleidoscope acoustic analysis software hoping the use of this tool will speed up the analysis of data gathered by the automated recording units. Currently the only reliable way to carry out this task is to scan the spectrograms manually which is very time-consuming and has led to a huge data backlog.
Our organisation has been invited to give a short presentation about the plight of the Western Ground Parrot at the upcoming Rotary District Conference in Fremantle. We hope this will garner some philanthropic support from WA Rotarians.
During recent weeks WA's other ground-dwelling parrot, the elusive Night Parrot, has made headline news when Bruce Greatwich succeeded in photographing one of the birds in the state's northwest. The rare parrot has now been detected at four different locations in recent years, including three in outback Queensland, which also gives me hope that the equally cryptic Western Ground Parrot may still survive at locations other than Cape Arid National Park and nearby Nuytsland Nature Reserve.
Contacts:
Chairperson: Anne Bondin Phone: (08) 9844 1793
Email: wgparrot@gmail.com
Mailing address: PO Box 5613, Albany, WA 6332
A printable copy of our newsletter can be downloaded from our website
