Snipers, recorders – and secrets: Saving the Aussie parrot called ‘birdwatching’s Holy Grail’

This story is part of the February 8 edition of Good Weekend.See all 11 stories.

The drive from Longreach to Pullen Pullen Reserve in the far west of Queensland takes about five hours, and as the sun sets the dirt road becomes hairy. Cattle, roos and wild horses blunder into our path.

Behind the wheel is Nick Leseberg, an ecologist, who drives at a slow but steady pace with keen eyes that miss little in the fading light. We pull over at the side of the road at one point to inspect an echidna curled up against the intrusion of noise and light. We skirt around a tiny Stimson’s Python.

Closer to the gates of the 56,000-hectare wildlife sanctuary a giant wedge-tailed eagle, its wings aged black, perched atop an unnameable heap of roadkill, lifts its head and glares at us. It’s late by the time we settle in at the Bush Heritage Australia headquarters at Pullen Pullen, a string of well-appointed demountables on a bluff above the floodplains of the Diamantina River. This is channel country, harsh and dry until it’s flooded each year by the monsoon waters that eventually drain into Lake Eyre.

We’re given a safety briefing by Pullen Pullen’s on-site manager, ecologist Bill Webeck, a wiry bloke with a quiet presence and a Ned Kelly beard. He offers blunt advice: “Don’t walk off the cliffs, all the grass is spiky, and everything out there,” he gestures vaguely about into the darkness, “wants to kill you.”

We’re here in the hope of seeing the night parrot, the most mysterious of Australian birds. The night parrot was first recorded by Western observers in 1845, when a member of Charles Sturt’s expedition from Adelaide – to find the great inland sea – “shot a beautiful ground parrot” one cold October morning out past Cooper Creek.

Ecologist Nick Leseberg is part of a group trying to increase night parrot numbers.Credit: Rhett Wyman

By the 1870s, museums around the world were after specimens, but they were already becoming hard to source. The night parrot was a key object of the Horn Expedition that left Oodnadatta on a camel train in 1894. One of the expeditioners discovered during the trip that, two years previously, a pet cat at the Alice Springs telegraph office had brought in so many feathers, wings and tails of night parrots that the operators had decorated picture frames with them.

The last known live bird to be taken as a specimen was shot in 1912 in Western Australia by a well digger and drover called Martin Bourgoin, though the remains were later lost. There were no more verified sightings of the parrot for more than a century, and it became the Holy Grail of birdwatching, drawing adventurers from around the world. In the years that followed, Bourgoin made notes of multiple encounters with night parrots across WA, each viewed today as convincing in their detail. He described the night parrot, by then also known as the ghost bird, as possessed of a “long-drawn-out mournful whistle”.

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The most dedicated birdwatchers are an obsessive group. Twitchers are known to go to extraordinary lengths to add to the “life list” of birds they’ve seen. Penny Olsen, an honorary professor at ANU and author of the 2018 book Night Parrot, Australia’s Most Elusive Bird, believes the obsession was driven in part by the end of the great age of exploration. There were no new continents to claim, few new animals to describe – but someone, somewhere, would become the person who found the night parrot. In the birding world, they would find real fame.

“Since the quest for the bird began, it’s been one tale after another of white men heading into the harsh desert landscape, fuelled by bravado and the desire to be The First,” she writes. The poet John Kinsella, in his book Night Parrots, makes reference to Lasseter’s Reef when he addresses the weird grip of the night parrot. Others mention the thylacine. But Leseberg, who secured his PhD with the University of Queensland and works with the Night Parrot Recovery Team, an assembly of experts charged with coordinating the protection and research of the bird, reckons those comparisons are not quite right. Lasseter’s Reef never existed and serious people knew the Tasmanian Tiger was gone, he says as we drive through Pullen Pullen the morning after our arrival. He believes the lure of the night parrot was that it was never truly lost; rather, it had simply slipped beyond our reach.

Pullen Pullen wildlife reserve on-site manager Bill Webeck.Credit: Rhett Wyman

As the search continued, credible but unconfirmed reports kept coming in that it was still out there. Each one was analysed and debated and folded into the growing science and folklore of the animal, some prompting new expeditions. Night parrots are, says Olsen, a dangerous animal to fall in love with. “There is a kind of madness there.”

One day in October 1990, the Australian Museum ornithologist Wolter Boles was driving along a road in far west Queensland with colleagues when they pulled over to watch a group of Australian pratincoles, little grey birds also known as roadrunners.

He looked to his feet and there in the dust saw a desiccated carcass. A night parrot. It was the first incontrovertible evidence that the bird had survived since the specimen was shot in 1912, and enough for the museum to claim a $50,000 reward that had earlier been offered by the millionaire adventurer Dick Smith for proof of its life.

Leseberg shakes his head in wonder when he speaks of this moment. “Imagine all the things that had to go right for that to happen? The car had to stop in that exact spot. They had to get out of the car. They had to know what they were looking at.” Interest in the bird surged again, but again the night parrot disappeared, though the focus of the search narrowed.

Leseberg and others look for traces of the elusive bird.Credit: Rhett Wyman

There, in September 2006, a park ranger and former roo shooter called Robert Cupitt, better known as “Shorty”, was grading a fence line in the Diamantina National Park when he found a headless parrot that had apparently clotheslined itself on the fence. Night parrots were known to fly low. Suspecting it to be one of the elusive birds he’d heard so much about, he delivered it to Paul Neilson, who to this day owns the Tattersalls Hotel in Winton, the nearest town. Neilson, too, had become something of a night parrot buff. Today the walls of the pub are lined with night parrot pictures and newspaper clippings. According to Audubon magazine, the Bible of global birding publications, Neilson’s eyes went wide as he recognised the lifeless bundle.

At this point authorities should have been notified. A search raised. Investigations should have been made, a recovery plan developed as part of an all-out effort to find, study, protect and rehabilitate the species. Instead, Neilson stuck the bird in a freezer out the back of the pub and called a friend, John Young, a wildlife photographer, naturalist and tour guide who had found something like fame in the birdwatching community and fostered the nickname “the Wild Detective”.

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Talk to enough people about John Young, and you’ll hear two things repeated. Firstly, that the man is a natural birder, a self-taught naturalist of preternatural ability, one who over the years has subjected himself to the most intense privations on long, lonely expeditions to track down the most elusive animals. “It’s like he knows where the birds are going to go before they do,” one ecologist who has spent time in the field with him says. “It is like he knows how they think.”

The other thing you hear about Young is that he is not entirely reliable. Other naturalists have had trouble verifying discoveries he claims to have made. This presents a particular problem to the birding community, and to science. Birdwatchers live and die by their life lists, the lists they compile of the birds they’ve seen, and the circumstances in which they’ve seen them. The longer your list, the more accomplished a twitcher you are. And these lists are not policed by any mechanism beyond good faith.

Twitchers are the original citizen scientists, providing crucial data on animal distribution and population health. For this data to be of use, mainstream scientists need to be able to trust their observations.

Young’s data, although included in the records of universities and museums, has been disputed. In 2006, the Queensland Minister for the Environment issued a press release announcing that Young had discovered what was thought to be a new species, which he called the blue-fronted fig-parrot. The release quoted the state’s environment minister at the time, Lindy Nelson-Carr: “Advancing knowledge about rare species in Queensland’s forests depends on such dedicated science and perseverance as John’s,” she said. “This is an exciting discovery.”

While some birders and scientists celebrated, others were sceptical, with some noting that Young’s photographs looked odd. Greg Roberts, then a journalist with The Australian and a birdwatcher himself, published a story questioning the claims. Faced with growing controversy, Queensland’s Environment Protection Agency said it would “not be undertaking further investigations into Mr Young’s claim” without further evidence, Roberts reported. Support for Young’s work fractured between dedicated fans in the birding community and a growing group of experts who doubted his reliability.

After taking the call from Neilson about the parrot in his freezer, Young had a chance to rebuild his reputation. He duly refocused on the search for the one of world’s most elusive birds, claiming in lectures and news reports of 17,000 hours scouring some of Australia’s most inhospitable landscapes in search of it.

A rare night parrot specimen, found dead after it had flown into a wire fence at Pullen Pullen, now housed at Queensland Museum.Credit: Rhett Wyman

In 2013, he emerged from the bush with feathers, photos, video and audio recordings of the night parrot that he presented to a dazzled audience of scientists and ornithologists at an invitation-only event at Queensland Museum. His evidence was incontrovertible. He had found the night parrot; he had his fame.

Young gave no detail away in announcing his discovery, but it seems he made the breakthrough by focusing on the channel country in western Queensland where Shorty Cupitt had found the garrotted parrot corpse. Perhaps he narrowed the scope by searching for night parrot feathers used in the lining of other birds’ nests, which he searched by the thousand. Egg collecting had long been banned as a pastime, but Young was known to have once been a leader in the field.

Now the fate of one of the most endangered and sought-after birds on Earth rested on the shoulders of one of Australia’s most controversial naturalists. The experts who had such a fractious relationship with Young now needed him to lead them to the bird and brief them on what he had learnt about it – if they were to have any chance of protecting it and start the process of rebuilding its numbers.

Leseberg checks autonomous recording devices used to monitor the birds.Credit: Rhett Wyman

University of Queensland ecologist Dr Steve Murphy, who knew Young and who’d been called on to help verify his night parrot material, was dispatched by the director of the CSIRO’s Australian National Wildlife Collection, Dr Leo Joseph, to begin foundational ecological work on the night parrot with Young. That meant first extracting details about the bird and its location from him, which would not be easy. Young was reluctant to share his secrets. “He was very protective of the site and the birds, I believe that genuinely,” Murphy tells me. Young also knew that the research that would surely follow his discovery was better suited to trained scientists than a wild detective. Having found the night parrot, he would have to surrender his involvement in the scientific efforts that would follow. But he also knew that if he was to restore his reputation after the fig parrot debacle, he needed legitimate validation.

Young eventually invited Murphy to meet him in Cairns. Together they drove 12 hours to a 420,000-hectare cattle holding called Brighton Downs that borders the Diamantina National Park in remote south-western Queensland. That night Young guided Murphy to a site on a low hill, where Murphy heard the call of the night parrot for the first time.

Over the months that followed, the unlikely colleagues began their research into the night parrot. They set up separate camps in the blasting sun on the remote gibber plain and went about their work, cooking together morning and night. Murphy was methodical; Young worked by his gut. He gave up his secrets in fits and starts. Life in the field with Young was trying, says Murphy, but they managed to build a relationship. “He could be good company. He told a good yarn, you could see why he was such a successful showman.”

As the two worked, some in the birding community were frustrated at the secrecy of the project. Others continued to query Young’s reliability. (Young was unable to be contacted for this story.)

An 1867 illustration of the night parrot by English ornithologist John Gould. Credit: Australian Museum

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Dressed for the field in Pullen Pullen, Leseberg looks more cowboy than twitcher. At 45, he’s tall and angular, self-possessed, prone to Western-style boots.

After Young discovered the night parrot, Bush Heritage Australia, a non-government organisation that has secured vital environmental sites around the country, bought what became Pullen Pullen from Brighton Downs for the protection and study of the night parrot. It has kept the exact location of the birds a secret ever since.

As he shows Good Weekend around the property, Leseberg tells his story. As a kid growing up in Goulburn in the 1990s, he was a keen birder, but after school he joined the air force and studied at the Australian Defence Force Academy with dreams of flying fighter jets. He didn’t make the cut, and if you ask he’ll tell you he served as an air traffic controller during his stint in Afghanistan.

Leseberg looking for a nest. The birds often roost inside dense clumps of spinifex that offer protection from predators.Credit: Rhett Wyman

Push a little further and you’ll discover he’s being modest. Leseberg was the first Australian soldier to be trained by the US military as a JTAC (joint terminal attack controller). JTACs typically deploy with small special forces units to direct artillery and air support in combat from the front lines. It’s about as difficult and dangerous as a soldier’s work gets.

But his experience in the air force would help in his next career. While studying ecology after his 13 years in uniform, he led wealthy birders on expeditions around the world. He had a reputation as a man who could find difficult birds and help build those life lists. By the time he was scouting for postgraduate work, the Night Parrot Recovery Team needed someone to build on Young’s and Murphy’s early work. Everyone was interested in the night parrot, and it was feared some would break the rules to find its hold-out population.

“A little bit of night parrot politics was hardly going to bother him,” says Professor James Watson of the University of Queensland, who took him on as a PhD candidate and in 2016 dispatched him to Pullen Pullen. It was a job a thousand more experienced scientists would have killed for.

Leseberg leads us up a long low hill – a tabletop mesa known around here as a “jump up”. It’s a mild morning, but you can feel the pulse of the sun bounce back at you from the loose iron rock that carpets the dry earth.

We look down into a little gully, which is – it is thought – where Young rediscovered the night parrot. Much of the ground is covered with clumps of spinifex, which can be hard to picture if you haven’t seen the country. When spinifex survives a few seasons without burning, it builds up to something like a stranded coral reef, a dense barrier of needles standing higher than your waist, cured hard by the sun and broken only by meandering passageways of bare earth. Inside these protective clumps the night parrots make their nests, and in them fledglings are well protected from predators.
Leseberg leads us to another site to show off one of the digital listening posts he’s installed. When the sun sets, he says, we have a good chance of seeing the bird not far from here.

For such a long sought-after animal, the night parrot is not much to look at. Ornithologists often describe it in ungenerous terms. References to the “fat budgie” are not uncommon. There’s a story that one cattleman who sold land for the bird’s protection was asked in a Winton pub if he’d ever seen one. “Yeah”, he replied, “it looks like a fistful of hundred-dollar bills.” The Australian Museum describes it as a mottled yellowish green, medium-sized, plump and “rather undistinguished”. The Museum of Western Australia adds, not particularly helpfully, that at 60 grams, it weighs about as much as a “small chocolate bar and 10 paper clips”.

For half an hour, the ghost birds talk. The first two calls are soft, short, single notes: Dink dink.

Late that afternoon, as the earth’s colours start to explode around us, we thread along the crest of another jump up and through the scrub to the far side. Leseberg points out a grinding stone that resembles an inverted polished tortoise shell. It’s impossible to imagine when it was last put to use, but obvious why you’d choose this spot for the chore of making your daily bread.

We perch along a low cliff over another reef of spinifex as the ochres wash into greys and blues. Leseberg glances at his watch and says quietly, “You’ll hear them in six minutes.”

In fact, seven pass before the first call sounds, and then for half an hour, exactly half an hour, the ghost birds talk. The first two calls are soft, short, single notes: Dink dink. We all point at once into the darkness and Leseberg puts his hands on his knees and rocks back in silent delight. He’s spent countless hours on this spot over the years recording these calls and noting them in a neat hand in worn notebooks, but the thrill has not ebbed. The next calls are two notes, drawn out. Bourgoin’s “mournful whistle”.

Once, when a feral cat began showing interest in a pair of noisy fledglings hidden in the spinifex, the team became so concerned that it deployed a sniper to watch over the nest each night.

Looking down into the country itself we have no chance of seeing the birds, but later Leseberg explains what we’d heard. After sunset, the adult birds, which form pairs but roost separately, venture out of their nests and call to one another to join up before flying together to the desert grasses to graze. Together they will return before dawn.

Once, when a feral cat began showing interest in a pair of noisy fledglings hidden in the spinifex, the team became so concerned that it deployed a sniper to watch over the nest each night after the parents departed to graze. There might have been as few as 10 night parrots on Pullen Pullen when Good Weekend visited.

Over the years, Leseberg – and Murphy and Young before him – have built up a picture of the night parrot’s life and distribution, its habits and needs and the threats they face. Leseberg believes they held out here because the landscape is both charged from the flooding of the Diamantina, but so arid and harsh between these pulses of life that it has only ever been lightly grazed. There was little stock to protect, which meant the dingo was not hunted to extinction in the region, and in turn they may have kept cat numbers low. Foxes never ventured this far north.

The researchers mourned the loss of an active nest to a snake, of a single bird hitting a wire fence.

The gibber plains are too harsh for the invasive weeds that have taken over much of Australia’s great interior. There, in the absence of the fire management of the land’s original custodians, blazes spread unchecked across the landscape, carried by weeds rather than being arrested by the bare earth that would once have separated the clumps of native foliage.

Leseberg’s work demonstrated that microphones are more effective in finding and tracking the birds than camera traps. In his PhD, completed in 2022, he described how best to deploy these tools to ensure that the calls of any existing birds were captured by them. He learnt how to lay out sound equipment across the landscape not only to show where the birds ventured, but where they did not.

The researchers discovered what patterns of landscape best suited the bird, the ideal variance of roosting spinifex to nutrient grazing grasses. They constantly monitored the listening posts as the population’s numbers rose and fell over the seasons, hovering somewhere in the low teens. They mourned the loss of an active nest to a snake, of a single bird hitting a wire fence. They wove reflective tape onto the fence lines to make the dangerous barriers visible to the parrots. They kept the cattle out, they trapped and destroyed cats.

Reflective tape on fences makes the hazards visible to the low-flying birds.Credit: Rhett Wyman

As their knowledge grew, they were able to apply this new understanding of the bird’s use of the landscape to other distant regions where it was believed it might have held out.

In September 2024, Clifford Sunfly, a Ngururrpa ranger, Rachel Paltridge with the University of Western Australia and Leseberg announced the discovery of a population of around 50 night parrots on the fringe of the Great Sandy Desert in WA by Indigenous rangers using methods developed at Pullen Pullen.

There are now known populations in the NT, as well as in the Diamantina National Park near Pullen Pullen, and another in a secret location somewhere further north. No one knows how many are out there. “If someone said there were just 500 I’d be surprised, but if someone said there were as many as 5000 I’d be surprised,” says Murphy. Today research is focused on discovering where else the bird might have survived and extending protections to any new populations. “Think of it as a species in palliative care,” says Leseberg. “We are trying to build up its numbers, bring it back to health.”

On our last night at Pullen Pullen, Leseberg is determined to show us a bird. We head off to another site before dusk. Here there is slightly less chance that the parrots will be present, he explains. But if they are, and if we sit in the right spot and look up into the sunset rather than down into a gully, we should see them in silhouette.

We park. Leseberg passes us each a beer from an esky, pops them on his key ring and we tread towards the sunset. “Five minutes,” he whispers soon after we’ve settled on the plain.

He is on the nose this time. In precisely five minutes, we hear a soft dink dink and then the response. They’re close and coming closer, flittering from one clump of spinifex to the next. But they are behind us in the darkness.

Had we sat 10 metres back, we’d have seen them against the dying light. Again Leseberg rocks back, his smile a glowing strap across his face in the gathering dark.

We drink our beers in silence as the night parrots go about their invisible dance. Then they fly off to the grasslands.

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