Night Parrot
Thought extinct for over 100 years. It was probably always there — just never seen
No confirmed photograph exists
Location
Spinifex desert interior, Queensland and Western Australia, Australia
Overview
The night parrot is a small, plump, cryptically green-brown parrot of Australia's desert interior. It was reliably recorded for the last time in 1912, then vanished. For a century, ornithologists debated whether it still existed or had silently gone extinct in the remote spinifex grasslands where no one was looking. In 1990, a fresh road-killed individual was found in Queensland — confirming it still lived somewhere. Then in 2013, naturalist John Young spent years in remote outback, following historical records and local knowledge, and finally photographed and filmed living birds in southwest Queensland. The search had lasted 101 years.
Why haven't we found it?
The night parrot may be the most difficult bird in the world to observe. It is strictly nocturnal, nests deep inside dense spinifex grass clumps (where it is completely invisible), sits motionless when alarmed, and its green-and-brown streaked plumage makes it indistinguishable from the spinifex even at close range. It calls only occasionally and is largely silent outside breeding season. It lives in country so remote that most of it has never been walked systematically. For a century, the most likely explanation for zero records was not extinction but invisibility.
How it was found
- 1
The 1990 road-killed specimen from Boulia, Queensland, proved the species was alive and drove a sustained search effort that eventually produced Young's 2013 photographs — the first confirmed images of a living night parrot since 1912.
- 2
Following Young's discovery, a protected research site was established in southwest Queensland. Camera traps and acoustic recorders have since confirmed multiple individuals using the area across different seasons.
- 3
Additional populations have been found in Queensland and Western Australia since 2016, suggesting the species may be more widespread than assumed — just extraordinarily difficult to detect without purpose-built survey methods.
Things worth knowing
- 1
John Young's 2013 video was presented to a room of Australian ornithologists who had spent careers assuming the bird was gone. Several described the moment as one of the most significant in Australian birdwatching history.
- 2
Night parrots nest inside living spinifex clumps — domed, spiny grass mounds that can be a metre across. The entrance tunnel is tight enough that only the parrot can squeeze in. The nest chamber inside is essentially invisible from any exterior angle.
- 3
Their calls — a 'dink dink' whistle and a frog-like croak — are so unlike other parrots that early museum collectors who heard the sounds at night around their camps did not connect them to the bird they were trying to find.
- 4
In 2017, a separate individual was found in Western Australia's Pilbara region by a BirdLife Australia survey team using acoustic detection equipment — suggesting the bird's range may be much larger than the Queensland site alone.
- 5
The night parrot is the only truly nocturnal parrot in the world apart from New Zealand's kākāpō. Both evolved nocturnality on islands or regions where, historically, there were no mammalian predators active at night.