How the Night Parrot is being reintroduced across Australia

Because this is where it started, this is where night parrots were found in 2013 by John Young. I was a young fella growing up reading bird books and and always look at the page with the night parrot and you know just imagine that thing's out there somewhere and you know you'd never dream of seeing it and if you'd told me even you know even like you know 10 years ago like just after I was first discovered that you know you'd get to play an important role in its conservation building our knowledge of the species I wouldn't have believed you so it's become a really important part of my life and for that reason Pawn Pawn's important to me personally. We knew nothing about the species that had been missing for you know more than a century we knew nothing about it and we were presented with an opportunity to potentially save a species. So you know catching and tagging a bird working out that it was traveling you know tens of kilometers at night covering thousands of hectares and working out the different habitats that it was using that enabled us to build you know the first ever conceptual model for how how night parrots use the landscape which is really important because you need to understand that to know you know to know where where else to look for them. Following on from that you know I was able to do some work around like acoustics and and sort of studying the calling behavior of the birds and working out how to find them. Once you knew where in the landscape to look for something and you knew how to look for something then we could expand beyond Pullen Pawn and we could start looking for the species really you know make a real concerted effort to look for the species elsewhere and it was that that information that you know that was born here on Pullen Pawn that we're able to take to you know like indigenous ranges in Western Australia and to other places in Western Australia and look for the birds there look for the birds elsewhere in Queensland and that's resulted in we've gone from you know not knowing where any populations were you know not much more than 10 years ago and now we're up to something like you know 12-13 populations and and all those all those birds have been found because of what started here on Pullen Pawn this is the place where it all started which is what makes it so important. We know what threatens it and we know that we need to mitigate those threats and at the moment we can't we don't have the funding you know we just don't have the impetus I suppose to really manage those threats at the scale required because remember it's it's one thing to manage those threats here on a 50,000 hectare reserve on Pullen Pawn and protect you know the handful of night parrots that live here it's another thing to do it at the scale that we need to properly recover the species and at the moment that's not funded we're not doing it but and that's and we need to if we really want to save the night parrot.