The Difficult Bird Research Group studies Australia’s most endangered birds, and run national monitoring programs for the swift parrot, regent honeyeater, forty-spotted pardalote, superb parrot and the palm cockatoo, as well as leading an urgent intervention to rescue the orange-bellied parrot from extinction.
With information to protect these species being desperately needed, strong data has not been available in the past to inform conservation decisions, however the team from the Difficult Bird Research Group are trying to rectify this by developing cutting edge techniques to address the challenges posed by these species to research, and applying their findings to inform on-ground management actions.
One of the researchers, Dr Dejan Stojanovic from the Australian National University recently tweeted: “In unlikely news I got a happy tear in my eye because of genetic data! A few years ago I took a swift parrot to a carer after she hit a window on Bruny and she was ultimately released. Just discovered she survived to mother 8 kids in the years after AND I found a photo of her!”
Image source: Dr Dejan Stojanovic (@teamswiftparrot) Twitter Page