The story of the Paradise parrot – the only mainland Australian bird marked ‘extinct’

Few but the most dedicated ornithologist will know anything about Australia’s Paradise parrot.

That is because it has the dubious distinction of being the only mainland Australian bird marked “extinct” by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Its premature vanishment almost a century ago, meanwhile, remains prescient today when it comes to how best to protect other threatened Australian avian species.

That the Paradise parrot – Psephotellus pulcherimus – was already on the verge of extinction by 1900 in its habitat on the Darling Downs in the Queensland colony speaks volumes about the dramatic environmental impact of colonisation on native grassy woodlands.

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Indeed, its near disappearance by the beginning of the 20th century happened in a part of the continent where the most extreme frontier violence of the late 1800s and early 1900s occurred. This resulted in the killings of potentially tens of thousands of Indigenous people and the diminution of their land-management practises including fire usage.

As James Cook University historian Russell McGregor writes in CSIRO Publishing’s Historical Records of Australian Science series: “ … the environmental transformations wrought by colonists, probably including the changed fire regimes consequent on Aboriginal dispossession, were deadly to the Paradise parrot.

“By the turn of the 20th century, the species had dwindled to the point that many feared it might not survive. There were no confirmed sightings in the first two decades of that century.”

McGregor’s paper charts the rediscovery of the paradise parrot 100 years ago when Cyril Jerrard sighted a pair of the distinctive birds on his property near Gayndah in the Burnett district of Queensland. It also looks at the conservation legacy of Alec Chisholm, a campaigning amateur ornithologist and one of Australia’s most popular pioneering nature writers, who helped rediscover the Paradise parrot before chronicling its swift demise.

McGregor’s book about Chisholm – Idling in Green Places: A Life of Alec Chisholm – was shortlisted for the 2020 National Biography awards.

“I became intrigued by the ways in which he tried to cultivate a conservationist ethos in the public by encouraging an emotional connection with nature, especially birds,” McGregor told Guardian Australia. “In some ways it was like conservation today; in some ways very different. I also became intrigued by the extent to which his fame faded in his old age and after his death.”

In 1917 as a 27-year-old Brisbane-based journalist, Chisholm set out to determine if the parrot still lived. He investigated many false sightings. On 11 December 1921, Jerrard told Chisholm he had identified a pair of the birds.

Jerrard soon saw the pair again – with perhaps six others he assumed were their chicks. On 18 March 1922, Jerrard sent Chisholm photos of the birds on their termite mound nest. It was the first time the birds had ever been photographed. But portents for their nesting were grim; once they abandoned the nest, Jerrard discovered, their eggs were rotten.

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The photographs mark another “first”. Never before had a photograph of an Australian bird been accepted as proof of existence. Incredibly, prior to this the existence of even threatened species was confirmed by shooting a specimen and skinning it.

“That is still the procedure under certain circumstances today, but in the 1920s, specimen collecting by amateurs was rife and the gun was as normal a birding accoutrement as a pair of field glasses,” McGregor writes.

Nonetheless, the continued collection of rare species was becoming ever more controversial. And Chisholm was among the most vociferous opponents of it.

Several times in the 1920s he clashed with the veteran South Australian ornithologist Edwin Ashby, who maintained that amateur collecting was not only essential for the advancement of science but also an admirable “character-building” exercise.

Chisholm, McGregor recounts, wrote that the average private collector “is a relic of barbarism and a perversion of civilisation. He is more; he is a relic of sin, masquerading under the honoured name of science”.

Countless Paradise parrots had already been shot and skinned, part-paving their road to extinction. They were in museum drawers, having been taxidermied into adornments for colonial mantle pieces and collected for science beginning with the bird killed by zoological collector John Gilbert in 1844 (he described it as “multicoloured and superlatively beautiful”) and sent to his ornithologist employer, renowned ornithologist John Gould (of the famed bird drawings).

But nobody was shooting at Gayndah Paradise parrots. That Chisholm was the only one to seek them out and see them during a two-day visit in 1922 probably afforded the birds a little more life.

“Even before he sighted the parrots, Chisholm pondered the causes of their precipitous decline,” McGregor writes. “He was not sure of the precise factors, but he knew they resulted from European settlement and included, especially, the excessive and poorly timed burning of grasslands, trapping for the aviary trade and the ravages of feral cats.”

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Chisholm lamented that the bird’s “fatal gift of beauty” had effectively led to its demise and, as McGregor observes, “he understood that it was human induced – more specifically, European-induced – environmental change that was impelling the Paradise parrot towards extinction”.

Jerrard last reported to Chisholm having seen the parrot in 1927. Jerrard’s neighbours last saw it in 1929. Plausible reports of sightings in the 30s and 40s turned out to reference observances of the birds decades earlier.

Capture and relocation of the Paradise parrot from Gayndah was never apparently considered in the way it was for other threatened species such as the Superb Lyrebird. Neither was a sanctuary considered.

Captive breeding and releasing into natural habitat – which is common today – was considered for the Paradise parrot. Chisholm and Jerrard planned to do so. But that was abandoned when Jerrard found the rotten eggs in 1922.

While national parks were being gazetted across Australia – including in Queensland’s most scenic and pristine country – the Paradise parrot’s habitat was never going to get a look-in.

“The Paradise parrot was stunningly beautiful but among its misfortunes was the fact that its habitat was not, and failed to meet the aesthetic standards demanded for contemporary national park declarations . . . it was open, grassy woodland of a kind so common that Australians took it for granted,” McGregor writes. “Conservationists could make a case for saving a gorgeous bird, but preserving a prosaic landscape was, in the 1920s and 1930s, a bridge too far.”

Despite extinction the paradise parrot has unfortunately failed to evoke Australian imagination in the same way as other threatened or vanished species. Not least, perhaps, the Tasmanian Tiger – Thylacine – which has become something of a mythic creature in national imagination amid continued (unverified) reported sightings and occasional competitions and rewards for finding one.

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Some of the practices that were not enacted to save the Paradise parrot are used today. It is heartening, for example, to see the fusion of captive breeding and Indigenous land-use and protection to save the habitat and species of the Regent Honeyeater.

So much of Chisholm’s advocacy for the Paradise parrot, and the fate of the bird itself, seems prescient to today’s threatened avian species amid the spectre of climate change and the recent spate of related bushfires to native habitat.

In terms of the parrot’s significance, when it comes to saving other avian species today, McGregor says: “I think we need a particular suite of intellectual, social, cultural and economic attributes if we’re going to be successful in that regard. We need scientific knowledge about endangered species – their ecological requirements, habitats, et cetera – but we also need a cultural outlook that puts a premium on the continued existence of other species.

“We need scientific understanding of how a species’ survival might best be ensured, but we also need a level of emotional engagement with other species to the extent that their survival matters to us in a personal way. The tragedy of the Paradise parrot happened because few, if any, of these circumstances pertained in interwar Australia.”