Monitoring Country
Night parrot
Pezoporus occidentalis
Endangered
The night parrot is a nocturnal (active at night) bird that is cryptic (well hidden), which makes it hard to monitor. It was thought to be extinct until it was rediscovered in 2013. Now, it is listed as endangered under the EPBC Act.
What Night Parrots Look Like
Night Parrots are a small parrot with:
- long wings and a short tail.
- bright green body and yellow belly.
- black and yellow pattern.
Young night parrots are grey and change to green as they get older.
What Night Parrots Sound Like
Night parrots have many different calls. You can hear some of their calls by clicking here.
Night Parrots start calling about 30 minutes after sunset - they only call for a few minutes. They also start calling 30 – 90 minutes before sunrise – they call for 10 – 15 minutes.
Night Parrots call more after rain.
Where Night Parrots Live
Night Parrots used to live across most of Australia’s arid and semi-arid zone. It is now only found in scattered locations across northern central Australia. Where the night parrot lives is still not well known.
Where Night Parrots Roost (Sleep)
Night Parrots like to roost (sleep) in long unburnt spinifex. Good roosting habitat has lots of big spinifex hummocks over a large area with not many trees around. Below are some photos of good roosting habitat.
Where Night Parrots Eat
Night Parrots need feeding habitat near where they roost. Good feeding habitat is where water collects on the ground after rain and is surrounded by lots of food plants like grasses, herbs, samphire and chenopods.
Where they live
Main Threats
Threats to the night parrot are not well known. Scientists believe they are:
- Night parrots are particularly vulnerable predation by feral cats due to their preferred roosting sites.
- Predation
Better understand:
- To better understand where night parrots do and don't live.
- To see how many night parrots live on your Country.
- To check on how well your management is working.
The best way to know if Night Parrots live in a place is by listening for their calls. ARUs are a sound recording device that can be set up to record for calls and save them to a memory card. You can then check the sound recordings using computer software to see if there are any Night Parrot calls.
Using ARUs, we can know if Night Parrots live (or don't live) in a place. If we monitor the same places, over many years, we can see if there are changes to where Night Parrots live.
Any time you do work that might disturb or interfere with native animals and vegetation, particularly threatened species, you need to check with the state authorities to see if you need any approvals, such as scientific licences or animal ethics committee permits.
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Primary sources
This landing page was developing using the following sources:
Primary source(s): Instructions on setup and installation of Song Meter 4 (sm4) for night parrot detection, N. Leseberg & S. Murphy, Adaptive NRM; SM4 for Night Parrots – Quick Guide, Green Fire Science, Adaptive NRM.
Buying guide(s):
- ARU buying guide
Tools and resources:
- Data storage
- Data collection
- Mapping resource
Other resources:
- Song Meter SM4 user guide
- Have you seen a night parrot? (Poster)
- Quick_Habitat_Guide_Draft
- Interim guideline for preliminary surveys of night parrot (Pezoporus occidentalis) in Western Australia, The Government of Western Australia, Department of Parks and Wildlife
- Movements and habitat use of the night parrot Pezoporus occidentalis in south-western Queensland (Murphy et al., 2017)
- https://nightparrot.com.au/
- Accounting for both automated recording unit detection space and signal recognition performance in acoustic surveys: A protocol applied to the cryptic and critically endangered Night Parrot (Pezoporus occidentalis) (Leseberg et al., 2022)
- Movements and habitat use of the night parrot Pezoporus occidentalis in south-western Queensland (Murphy et al., 2017)