Saving Golden-shouldered Parrot from extinction

It’s a tough job conserving wild animals. The owners of Artemis Station know this better than most. For years, Artemis have been custodians, responsible for saving the rare Golden-shouldered Parrot. Now they find themselves overseeing what may become the last chance this species has to survive extinction.

The bird’s southern cousin, the Paradise Parrot, disappeared a long while ago. Eric Zillman was one of the last people to ever see one alive. He recalls their flashing wings and bright colours in the late 1930s when he would visit breeding grounds to level clay termite mounds for Brisbane’s nouveau riche to build tennis courts. The birds nest inside the mounds’ cool interiors.

It wasn’t nest destruction that sealed the birds’ fate though, but the rapidly changing environment. Tens of thousands of years of Aboriginal agriculture and burning, replaced by neglect and the introduction of livestock. The glimmer of burning red feathers among glades of purplish wallaby grass tussocks were replaced with cattle-trodden bare earth and encroaching bushland.

Ninety years later and Cape York’s Golden-shouldered Parrots face the same fate as Paradise Parrot so conservationWhy is animal conservation important? Animal conservation is important, because animals are the only mechanism to create biodiversity, which is the mechanism that creates a habitable planet for humans. Without animals, the energy from today’s plants (algae, trees, flowers etc) will eventually reach the atmosphere and ocean, much of it as carbon. The quantity of this plant-based waste is so More scientists, farmers and traditional owners are seeking to reverse this.

Conservation science at Artemis Station

Numbers of Golden-shouldered Parrot have dwindled to a thousand and one of the last strongholds of the southern most population at Artemis Station, is down to just fifty birds. Central to the future of this species are the efforts of these landowner-come-conservationists. They hope to find new ways to practice farming in keeping with traditional custodianship of the land … a way that it’s hoped, might secure a return for the region’s precious golden icon, while maintaining the land as a working farm .

Research has shown that encroachment of trees favours predators like Pied Butcherbirds that not only prey on young parrots but take adult males as well. Meanwhile, Dingo killing throughout the Cape has allowed populations of native herbivores to rise in some places, leading to a lack of the parrots’ favoured winter grass seeds. Scientists have set about trying to work out the optimal mixture of grazing and burning that might tip the balance back in favour of the parrot.

Why bother saving Golden-shouldered Parrots?

There are those who might say there are easier battles worth fighting than trying to reverse the extinction of a species in free fall decline. I don’t agree. The persistence of Golden-shouldered Parrot isn’t just about one species, it’s about the breakdown of an entire ecosystem. It’s about restoring some semblance of balance in a landscape that we depend on. Allocation of taxes for this kind of work might be seen as a drain on public resources but there are strong economic reasons that favour the protection of wild bird populations.

Animals are the only drivers of ecosystem stability, though this is a fact that is rarely (if ever) explicitly recognised in public policy. Just as importantly, we can only measure the health of ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More – the impact of our efforts – through the successful restoration of animal-rich habitat. When we lose wildlife, we lose everything we need to rebuild a habitable world.

Is it likely to succeed?

It entirely depends on your measure of success. As I discussed here, the ability to fail is a really important factor in any natural system but it isn’t politically expedient. If we’re to start supporting conservation seriously, we need to alter our expectations and realise that ecological outcomes are never predictable. The most important thing is to try to stabilise systems and increase their natural complexity and the only way to do that, is to have more abundant wildlife. Golden-shouldered Parrots are only one of many species that could ultimately benefit from the work.

If the parrot eventually goes extinct anyway, this shouldn’t be because of lack of trying and the only failure will be ours, if we either do nothing, or we don’t recognise the broader benefits of those efforts. What the conservationists are really working out, is a financially sustainable and economically viable way to maintain critical life support services. If the work, done in partnership with traditional owners, can find a way to sustain the health of the land and secure the food security and livelihoods of local people and wildlife, this will be a great success – even in the unfortunate event that the Golden-shouldered Parrot should disappear in the process. But why wouldn’t we try? How do we know this species isn’t the key to that success? We don’t. That’s the point.

The ecological complexity hurdle

Ecosystems are so complex and baselines shift so intensely all of the time (especially due to climate change), that it’s impossible to predict what the environment will look and behave like in a few years. Animals also impose the most significant impact on ecosystems, so any act of trying to ‘manage’ one species, such as Golden-shouldered Parrot, will have many unexpected results. This is why a common prerequisite for many landscape restoration projects, is creating animal-rich habitatsWhat is habitat for animals and people? Habitat, hence the word "habitable" describes the natural surroundings in which any animal (or human) lives, that houses basic needs, such as food and shelter. Vegetation, for example, is habitat for animals. On its own, habitat is not necessarily stable or sustainable, which is why it differs from an ecosystem. Habitat in disrepair More and letting nature take its course.

This is easier to say for low-biodiversity ecosystems in heavily modified areas of Europe, where much of this intelligence comes from. Australia still has remnants of more pristine habitats and is still considered one of the world’s megadiversity countries. Conservationists here are having to tackle the imminent extinction of almost two thousand species with one hand, while trying to uphold the protection of some of the world’s most important ecosystems with the other. The task would be a lot easier if there was widescale acceptance that animals matter.

Postage-stamp protection failure

Protection of animals in postage-stamp-sized reserves doesn’t work. This is why we’re in this extinction predicament in the first place. Many of those 2,000 threatened species once widespread across the Australian landscape are now confined to tiny headlands of habitat, dependent on expensive and intensive management to maintain tiny populations. Whereas the future of our food security and climate both depend on their widespread abundance and they are only 2,000 of the biggest animals – they represent billions more smaller creatures that are essential for the structural integrity of our land.

How can we have missed this fact? The scale and significance of animal impactWhat is Animal Impact? Without wildlife, Earth would not be habitable for humans, because it's animals that stabilise ecosystems. It’s a fundamental law of nature that animals (and humans) exist because we are the most likely lifeforms to minimise environmental chaos. Animal impact, therefore, is a measure of how much all wildlife is collectively responsible for creating a habitable Earth. The More on our food and economy largely goes unrecognised. We are one of the luckiest countries in the world. We have more native animals than most other countries, so we stand a great chance of securing a bright future for our economy.

Ironically, in the past, the more conservation has done to protect small pockets of land, the greater stress this has placed on dwindling wildlife. Creating an oasis in a cattle-infested desert is bound to attract an abundance of other more itinerant native animals, which also face the stress of competition with cattle and a rapidly changing landscape. With this lack of space, nature’s resources were bound to start running out. Now, we are seeing conservationists promoting the killing of native animals which is the very opposite of what’s needed, if we’re to fix Australia’s broken landscapes. Killing wildlife is almost always going to be detrimental, because of the over-riding control they have on ecosystem function(Of an ecosystem). A subset of ecosystem processes and structures, where the ecosystem does something that provides an ecosystem service of value to people. More and stability.

The path to saving Golden-shouldered Parrot

The first challenge for conservationists at Artemis Station is in trying to keep the species alive long enough. We don’t know if saving Golden-shouldered Parrot is vitally important but it could be. And what gives us the right to kill an animal that might be crucial for human survival?

The second, is persuading other land owners to realise the economic importance of conservation. This will require a completely new way of measuring success, not in terms of simple parrot numbers, but the integrity, health and viability of hundreds of years of future livelihoods.

We know that the structure and function of land and soil is failing under the intensity of cattle production and neglect – not to mention the flow-on effects this has on habitats like the Great Barrier Reef. We also know that the only way to fix this, is to experiment with restoring natural processes. The hope is that this will save Golden-shouldered Parrot and it is highly likely, this will restore economic viability of the land through soil fertility, water retention and a wide range of other climatic and food security benefits.

The evidence is out there, it’s just rare to find it being talked about at a policy level and it’s difficult for scientists to convey, because the outcomes are uncertain due to the inherent complexity of ecosystem processes. There is no way to prove if particular targets will be achieved or not. But that shouldn’t matter.

The fact remains, animals must be viewed as critical components of ecosystem stability, so any effort we make to try to manage outcomes with them, will benefit us greatly. Until we realise this, conservation will remain a tough, relentless and uncertain venture … but one that becomes more and more important, the closer we approach the sixth mass extinctionAnimal life hasn't existed for very long on planet Earth. In the last 500 million years, there have been five mass extinctions, defined as events that wiped out at least 75% of animal life. The Devonian mass extinction is considered to have been caused by the rise of plants on land, which polluted the oceans in the absence of animals. More.

The wholesale return of our landscape to natural processes, with or without successfully saving Golden-shouldered Parrot, cannot happen without an Australia-wide commitment to wildlife protection and a realisation of animal impact.

This is why it’s essential that Artemis Station’s project in saving Golden-Shouldered Parrot are supported, especially as they are driven and run locally, concurrent with the interests and livelihoods of traditional owners and other custodians of the land. What we could do better still, is to start grasping the significance of animals more widely, as it’s our future at stake whenever we allow more species to silently slip into extinction.