Seeing the incredibly rare orange-bellied parrot

August 17, 2024 6:29 PM

Seeing the incredibly rare orange-bellied parrot. Nature journalist Dr Ann Jones and BirdLife's Sean Dooley find one of Australia's rarest bids on the edge of Melbourne - the orange-bellied parrot. This is a 7 minute video from the Australian documentary series, The Secret Lives Of Our Urban Birds.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (3 comments total)

Awesome.

I had the pleasure of talking with some folks doing monitoring for orange bellied parrots a while back. There's a very particular stretch of the tasmanian cost where they breed, and then they migrate and spread out all over the South and South East Coast of Australia. They're suffering from severe habitat loss on the Tasmanian side, which is the root of the population problem, but they're nigh impossible to protect on the Australian side because they spread out so much, and you don't really know where they're going to, exactly. So it's not hard to lose an individual to a cat somewhere in the long stretch of coat between Melbourne and Sydney... It's a great example of the principle of extinction laid out in 'song of the dodo' - population tanks due to a systemic issue (habitat loss, in this case) but then the reduced population is more prone to suffer from one-off random effects.

Afaik, the Western treatment plant in Melbourne is the most reliable place to see them, though even there it's spotty.
posted by kaibutsu at 6:55 PM on August 17, 2024

I am such a sucker for this stuff. That was so cool. But I swear to God that I've said nearly the same thing about how to see a bird is in the hearing them sing or call and then seeing them i perched and in flight. While hardly a bird warcher, after hearing an Anna's hummingbird sing, I could see them in flight from across the street. Without my glasses even. Before hearing that song, all I suppose all I saw were floaters.
posted by y2karl at 7:08 PM on August 17, 2024

Pipsquack?
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:57 PM on August 17, 2024