Ever heard of the King Island
brown thornbill? What about the orange-bellied parrot? Can you guess which is
more endangered?
Tuesday 28 November
2017 23.00 GMT Last modified on Wednesday 29 November
2017 00.23 GMT
In January 2016, a keen
birdwatcher named Dion Hobcroft walked into the Pegarah state forest on
Tasmania’s King Island with a recorded birdcall and took the first
blurry photographs of the King Island brown thornbill.
The brown thornbill, Acanthiza pusilla archibaldi, is a
subspecies of the Tasmanian thornbill, distinguished from its cousins on the
big island by a slightly longer beak.
It is about 10cm long, coloured
various shades of brown, and thoroughly unexciting to the untrained eye.
Hobcroft’s was only the fourth confirmed sighting since 1974.
Some birds are easy to sell and …
others are very hard to sell because they are little brown birds
Kate Ravich, King Island natural
resource management group
According to a forthcoming review
of Australia’s avian threatened species programs, the King Island brown
thornbill is most likely to be the next bird to be declared extinct.
It shares the podium with the
King Island scrubtit, Acanthornis
magnus greenianus, which, with a population of fewer than 50 adults spread
across three isolated areas of ever-shrinking melaleuca swamp, is No 3 on the
list.
The orange-bellied parrot, which
stops off on King Island on its precarious annual flight from south-western
Tasmania to the Victorian coast, and has a wild adult population of fewer than
20 individuals, is the second.
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