The ground parrot

Somewhere in the low heath around you, quite possibly only a few paces off, lives a bird you are unlikely ever to see. The ground parrot has done the most un-parrot-like thing imaginable: given up the trees altogether. No canopy, no branch, no bright dash of colour flung against the sky. It spends its whole life down in the thick of the wallum, a slim, barred, grass-green bird that creeps and runs through the scrub as if it had forgotten it owned wings. Come too close and it flushes at the last second, a low jinking flight barely above the shrub-tops before it drops back into cover and is gone. What gives it away is a sound: a thin rising series of piped notes that carries across the heath in the half-light of dusk and dawn. That is how the people who count these birds find a creature otherwise just a rumour in the scrub.

The ground parrot is the wallum’s requirements made flesh, one of the most demanding specialists on the coast. It is fussy about one thing, the state of the heath, and fire decides that. A patch of wallum keeps moving: bare and open just after a burn, then thickening, then dense and heavy with seed, and at last, if left too long unburnt, rank and leggy, its seeding ground-layer shaded out from above. The bird needs the middle of that arc, and only the middle. Heath grown thick enough since fire to hide in and productive enough to feed in, but not so old that the low sedges and heath plants it lives on have gone. So fire is the thing it lives or dies by. Burn its country too often and the heath never ages into the dense, seed-rich stage the bird requires; leave it unburnt too long and the heath goes woody and empties of seed. Either way there is nowhere for a ground parrot to be.

Intermediate age is only half of what the bird asks for, and the other half is the part that undoes it. A ground parrot ranges widely to feed, and it needs its heath at the right age and in bulk. Only a large, connected tract can hold a whole patchwork of post-fire ages at once, so that whatever a given fire does to one corner, another corner is coming into the right stage. A moving quilt of burnt and recovering and ready ground, and somewhere in it a home for the birds. Shrink that tract to a small isolated fragment and the margin goes: a single fire can flip the whole patch into the wrong stage at once, with no heath of the right age next door to fall back on and no way for the birds to cross the cleared ground between one remnant and the next. For this parrot, large, connected, varied heath is the least it can live on.

That is the combination the modern landscape has been quietly taking away. Clearing removes the heath outright; fragmentation strips out the size and the connection; and fire regimes too frequent, too rare or too uniform flatten the mosaic of ages the bird rides. As that country has gone, the eastern ground parrot (Pezoporus wallicus wallicus) has pulled back to a handful of strongholds, among them the great sand-country heaths of Cooloola and the wider Great Sandy region, and it is listed as Vulnerable in Queensland, under the state’s Nature Conservation Act.

You do not save a ground parrot by managing ground parrots. You keep the wallum whole, large, and burnt on the varied rhythm its plants evolved with, and the parrot keeps itself — unseen out in the scrub, where you will hear it and never quite find it. Get the fire, the water and the space right and it holds on. Get one of them wrong and it is gone without a sound.