Main Club , 1 November 2024

Our speaker was Dr Sarah Comer, The Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions (DBCA) Regional Ecologist for the South Coast Region. For over twenty years, Sarah has been involved in fire management, feral cat ecology, and feral predator control and has coordinated several threatened species recovery programs. She talked to us about the Western Ground Parrot, Pezoporus flaviventris, now known by its Nyoongar name Kyloriny. This small, shy, elusive green parrot with a long tail hides in low, dense heath. 

Kyloriny is a critically endangered species teetering on the edge of extinction. Less than 150 birds remain in a single wild population on the south coast of Western Australia (WA). In the 1800s, they were found as far north as the sandplains north of Perth, but now there exists only a small population at Cape Arid.

The extinction risk was noted in 1906 and, by 1924, the danger to wildlife from feral cats was understood. Since 2010, the effectiveness of Eradicat has been tested at Two Peoples Bay, Mount Manypeaks, Fitzgerald River, and Cape Arid National Parks. Bushfire is another major threat to Kyloriny, especially as the heathland takes such a long time to recover. The combination of fire and ferals is potent. 

In 2019, a recovery team set out a landscape-scale acoustic monitoring grid at Cape Arid. 2015 was a bad year for fires, but a prescribed burn helped stop the spread of fires in 2019.  A Western Ground Parrot Conservation Planning Workshop was convened. It decided on these goals:

1. The protection of the species
2. Recovery of the population
3. Education
4. Resourcing recovery actions
5. Research and establishing more populations. Establishing a new population through wild-wild translocation follows IUCN guidelines to assess whether it is necessary, as well as careful site selection, assessment of possible threats at a new site and management of these, and assessment of the risk of removing birds from the source population. 

Between 2021 and 2023, up to 30 people per year supported the translocation, with volunteers putting in 8000 hours of time.  This included A-class bird banders who helped net the birds. Staff from DBCA and Perth Zoo coordinated the transport of the Western Ground Parrots so that no birds were injured during the process. Perth Zoo currently has six birds in captivity, and much can be learnt about the species from the zoo program because they are so difficult to study in the wild. Only two nests have ever been found in the wild.  

Secrets at Sunrise is a film that tells the story of the Friends group and the team of scientists from the Parks and Wildlife Service as they conduct fieldwork in the Cape Arid and Fitzgerald River National Parks, monitoring the birds and trying to reduce the threats to their survival. It shows the acoustic surveys, the feral predator mitigation work, and how the team works in this rugged area with such a cryptic species.

Sarah believes that the Kyloriny program provides inspiration, hope, and a blueprint for other projects to conserve biodiversity.

Mike Gregson