Nearly a century after the extinction of the paradise parrot, a tiny team is trying to protect its cousin – by using land clearing
In 1922, Cyril Jerrard captured the first and only photographs of the paradise parrot, the only Australian bird to be officially declared extinct since European colonisation. Jerrard was well aware he was looking at one of the last of its kind: “The one undisguisable fact [is] that the advent of the white man has spelled destruction to one of the loveliest of the native birds of this country,” he wrote in 1924.
The last accepted sighting of a paradise parrot – also by Jerrard – was in 1927, near Gayndah in the Burnett River district of southern Queensland.