Wings on King group warns: ‘We
may have lost the King Island brown thornbill and the King Island scrubtit
already’
Thu 24 May
2018 08.00 BSTLast modified on Thu 24 May 2018 08.01 BST
Residents of King Island in Tasmania want
the federal government to intervene to try to stop two bird species from going
extinct.
The King Island brown thornbill
and the King Island scrubtit were recently identified as numbers one and
three on a list of
Australian bird species most likely to go extinct in the next 20 years if
nothing was done.
Volunteers with the island’s
natural resource management group, with help from Birdlife, applied for federal
funding last year but were unsuccessful.
It is unclear how many endangered
thornbills are on the island because they are difficult to detect. They were
last seen by volunteers in 2015.
The most recent scientific
monitoring of the scrubtit put its numbers at fewer than 50 and found major
threats were habitat destruction, fire and poor fire management, and acid
run-off in forest soils.
The small King Island community
has been trying for years to get state and federal governments to help the
little brown birds and warn that without emergency help the species could go
the way of the bramble
cay melomys, a mammal species that went extinct because
officials were too late to act.
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