I have often wondered why no-one has trained a dog to search for Night Parrot. Get them tracking Ground Parrots and then move to the desert with a muzzle (to avoid eating 1080 baits and Night Parrots). Our Kiwi friends use this strategy successfully for finding Kakapo.
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Dion. Basically a good thought but I think this is unlikely to work in the case of Night Parrots. It’s a different situation with the Kakapo and Kiwis, because the dogs work in a specific area, and in an area which is known to contain the target. Sniffer dogs soon lose interest if they don’t get any hits. Steve Murray
Hi Anthea. “One difficulty would be that one cannot use binoculars on board an animal – however quietly an old horse stands, it still breathes, and the movement is enough to disturb the image”. If this were true no-one would take bins on pelagic trips!
The other problem with using dogs for Night Parrots is that we don’t have any Night Parrots to train them with. We could assume they smell the same as a Ground Parrot to a dog…but then you would have to have captive Ground Parrots to train them with anyway…I don’t think that would be too practical. Steve Murray
Hi Dion,
I believe these trained dogs are mainly trained to track scent. My work has used them for koalas before and there is a quoll dog available up here too. But I don’t know if any of the skins, even the recent ones, would carry enough scent to train a dog. I would think Ground Parrot scent would be too different to be useful, but I could be wrong.
Cheers, Chris
Dion,
There would be no problem training a dog to scent Night Parrot. You can train dogs to scent anything from explosives to termites. Might need more than one though. A lot of potential habitat to cover.
Cheers,
Carl Clifford
Sent from my iPad
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One difficulty might be that it is illegal to take a dog into National Park areas. I seem to recall that Gould and others claimed that a Ground Parrot is as strongly scented to a gun-dog as a quail, so it might well be practicable to train a dog, and then try in the inland..
A story I was told was that a riding-camel made the ideal mobile observation platform for Night Parrots. A camel’s feet are silent on sandy country, so it is not likely to disturb the parrot till it actually comes up against the Triodia clumps. The observer is up above the tussocks and Saltbush, and the camel could carry two observers keeping a look-out in all directions for any parrots that flew off. One difficulty would be that one cannot use binoculars on board an animal – however quietly an old horse stands, it still breathes, and the movement is enough to disturb the image; I expect a camel would be just as bad. Still a camel-mounted search travelling in line abreast might be successful.
Anthea Fleming
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