With only 140 left in the wild, the western ground parrot is in danger of becoming extinct.
Credit: Brent Barrett/Department of Environment and Conservation
DUBLIN: The future of Australian birds is bleak, according to a new report which says their conservation status has generally worsened as the country fails to adequately deal with ongoing threats.
The report, called The Action Plan for Australian Birds 2010, was carried out by researchers from Birds Australia (formerly the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union), Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory and the national science agency CSIRO. It classifies every Australian species and subspecies of bird according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List guidelines, which is the international standard for measuring risk of extinction.
Birds moving into the danger zone include the western ground parrot, the regent honeyeater and orange-bellied parrot. The grey-headed albatross from Macquarie Island in the southwest corner of the Pacific Ocean is listed as 'critically endangered', with rabbit damage pushing it close to the brink. In total, 13% of bird species in Australia are under threat.
"Northern Australian species such as the partridge pigeon are threatened by the perennial problems of over-frequent fire and habitat invasion by weeds and feral mammals. Much of tropical Australia looks pristine but is suffering from decades of inappropriate burning which is causing a shift to fewer, fire-tolerant plant species," said co-author Guy Dutson from Birds Australia.
Offshore perils
The report applies current knowledge to change the conservation standing of 66 birds since the last action plan report in 2000. It lists 27 as extinct, 20 as critically endangered, 68 as vulnerable and 63 as near threatened.
Most of the additions to the threatened list in 2010 were migratory waders, mainly due to reclamation or degradation of habitat along their migratory pathway. "The biggest threats are offshore - numbers of many migratory wader species have collapsed as a result of development along the East Asia Australasian Flyway - particularly in China and South Korea," said lead author Stephen Garnett from Charles Darwin University. "Also many seabirds that visit Australia are threatened by fishing practices, although there is some hope there through long term legal and educational campaigns and technological development."
The report gives information on each species' conservation status, range, abundance, ecology and threats. It also outlines what actions might be needed to recover that species. Numbers of western ground parrot have plummeted over the last decade and the species could be lost; fox baiting has allowed feral cats to proliferate, which have then preyed on the parrots before being removed.
"One important lesson of the last 10 years is that pest management must be integrated - remove one pest and another may proliferate," Garnett said. Most threatened birds are on oceanic islands, where invasive species have wreaked devastation.
The 'Dow Jones' of biodiversity
"Sadly we are losing species and subspecies very quickly," said co-author Hugh Possingham from the University of Queensland and Birds Australia. "This is an embarrassing record for a developed and rich country." Possingham described the data gathered for the Red List Index as the "Dow Jones" of biodiversity for Australia's birds. It is a credible, if depressing, numerical representation of how bad things are, he said.
"The main previous threat was land clearing - but after years of campaigning we have brought that to a halt," he said. Now, the loss of habitat condition through overgrazing or poor fire management looms as the big threat. Fire threatens not just in the north but also in the arid zone, southern heathlands and mallee, the low eucalypt woodland in semi-arid areas.
Decline of common birds
Sadly, it's the decline of common birds that are more of an issue. Rarity is a symptom of environmental change. When we're seeing many things becoming rare, things are altering rapidly. Even if some say change is inevitable and we have to balance this with what we can do to preserve ecosystem integrity, are we monitoring this well enough? Probably not. We're still losing common birds at a significant rate and not using birds as indicators of environmental condition, such as happens in the UK and Europe (where it is linked specifically to environmental management in statute). We have an opportunity here to help ourselves by helping the birds but politics in recent years has intervened, making it sound as though it is a birds-or-us argument. It is not .. if we get a serious skin complaint, we go to the doctor. It's a sign of things going wrong with our bodies. If birds start to disappear, this is a sign that the external things our bodies rely on for survival are going wrong.