Critically Endangered
Night parrot
Pezoporus occidentalis
The night parrot is a small parrot endemic to the continent of Australia.
Appearance
A relatively small and short-tailed parrot, the species' colour is predominantly a yellowish green, mottled with dark brown, blacks and yellows. Both sexes have this coloration.
Range and habitat
The night parrot is a small parrot endemic to the continent of Australia. A few sightings or recordings of its presence, with varying degrees of certainty, have occurred in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, south-western Queensland, the Lake Eyre basin in South Australia and the Northern Territory.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Habits
It has also been known as porcupine parrot, nocturnal ground parakeet, midnight cockatoo, solitaire, spinifex parrot and night parakeet.
In crisis
It is one of the most elusive and mysterious birds in the world, with no confirmed sightings of the bird between 1912 and 1979, leading to speculation that it was extinct. Sightings since 1979 have been extremely rare and the bird's population size is unknown, though based on the paucity of records it is thought to number between 50 and 249 mature individuals, and it is classified by the IUCN as a critically endangered species. The population size of this species is not known, but assumed to be continuing to decline.
As of July 2022, it is listed on the IUCN Red List as Critically endangered. According to the IUCN Red List the night parrot has a population of 40–500, or possibly larger.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Night parrot is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Night parrot, Wikidata item Q889639. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
