She was accused of ruining Young’s reputation. Her critics emailed booksellers demanding they remove “that terrible woman’s book” from the shelves. The bird might feel mythical, but it lives in the real world, and the consequences of misrepresenting its population size and distribution were serious.Īfter her book was published, Dr Olsen says she received a death threat. Young’s data was being used to inform decisions about funding and planning for Night Parrot conversation. “I think science should be as close to the truth as you can get.”

“To some extent, I was defending my profession,” she says of what she wrote. She also noted inconsistencies and question marks surrounding some of Young’s subsequent findings, including nests, eggs and feathers, saying they should not be taken as definitive proof of Night Parrot populations. In what The Australian called “ a stinging attack”, Dr Olsen suggested the bird which featured in Young’s original photographs was injured and had been staged for the photoshoot, not found in the way he claimed. Then, in her book, she set the record straight. At the library, she dug deeper and deeper until she had accumulated “a mountain of material” supporting her theories. I like to set the record straight.” She believes the public needs to have faith in facts, now more than ever.īefore even starting research on her Night Parrot book, Dr Olsen had suspicions that Young’s celebrated findings might not be all that they seemed. Absolutely everything, going back historically.”ĭr Olsen has a holy grail too: “I like the truth, as much as you can know it. She has been on her own version of a quest for the Night Parrot, only her quest didn’t take her into the outback, but deep into the stacks of the National Library of Australia. She is the author of the definitive book on the subject, Night Parrot: Australia’s Most Elusive Bird, and Honorary Professor at the ANU Research School of Biology. “And these characters get involved because there’s kudos if you’ve seen one or found one so that leads to some bad behaviour, you could call it.”ĭr Olsen is a different kind of Night Parrot expert. “It’s a hugely interesting story,” Dr Penny Olsen says of the history of the Night Parrot. For this critically endangered bird, John Young really was the hero we all needed. It was an onslaught of unbelievably good news, not to mention amazing PR for the Australian Wildlife Conservancy. While employed as Australia’s leading Night Parrot expert by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, Young identified more and more locations for Night Parrot populations over the coming years, photographing their nests, finding feathers, and recording calls. In the dozens of articles published around the world about the bird’s rediscovery, Young looks exactly the part of the larrikin hero: Crocodile Dundee meets Steve Irwin, with Merv Hughes’ moustache. In his gung-ho determination to find the Night Parrot, he told the ABC he was “ like a terrier dog”: “I couldn’t leave it alone, it was like it was blood in my veins and I just didn’t want to stop.” Described as a “bush detective”, Young had spent most of his life looking for – and often finding – rare birds in remote Australia, and he had the stories to match. No, the hero was the quester: John Young, the naturalist who took the photo. And quest stories are never really about the object being sought, anyway.

In the photographs, the green and black speckled bird appears to be cringing under the spotlight. You might think the hero would be the bird, but one of the few things we know about Night Parrots is they don’t like attention. There was a great hero too, cast in the leading role. It was a moment described by the New York Times, as “one of the greatest stories of species rediscovery in recent times.”Īnd it was a great story! In conservation news, it made for a nice change to have a happy, hopeful headline instead of a death notice. Until 2013, when the seeming impossible happened: someone actually got photographs of this “ white whale of the bird-watching world”. To see one would be like “ finding Elvis flipping burgers in an outback roadhouse”, “ a cockatoo in a snowstorm”, or, in more straightforward terms, “ a giant gold nugget”.įor more than a century, the Night Parrot has inspired not only colourful language, but obsessive odysseys, all fruitless, eluding everyone it lured into its desert habitat. It’s legendary, fugitive, mysterious, almost mythical: the ghost bird the Thylacine of the air. For such a small, hapless bird, the Night Parrot sure gets humans worked up.

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