Rediscovering the Night Parrot

A “gonzo naturalist” called John Young — “one of the best birdos in the whole world” — rediscovers the Night Parrot, a small bird endemic to the continent of Australia, which was last collected in the wild in 1912, and was feared extinct for decades. Young gets his tip-off from a Kangaroo shooter in Queensland who finds a carcass tangled in a barbed wire fence. “The squat parrot resembled a budgie that had inhaled a lumberjack’s breakfast. Its wing feathers were dark gray with yellow and green along their margins. The tail was banded like a bumblebee. The head, well, there was no head. But that didn’t matter. This was it, a Night Parrot and a young one to boot.” 

From “A Naturalist With a Checkered Past Rediscovered a Long-lost Parrot . . . Then Things Got Interesting” by Brendan Borrell for Audubon; Photos by Lachlan Gardiner