Mr Gilbert’s Beautiful Parrakeet The story of the paradise parrot is one of extinction and the allure of a lost species, as former Harold White Fellowship holder Penny Olsen reveals The paradise parrot is a small grass parrot, one of a group of three closely related, antbed-nesting parrots. The hooded parrot of Arnhem Land, the golden-shouldered parrot of Cape York and the paradise parrot of south-east Queensland are slender, perky little parrots with vibrant plumage. They live largely in grasslands, feed on the seeds of grasses, fallen or stripped from the stem, and excavate nests in the sides of termite mounds. Discovered on the Darling Downs, near Yandilla on the Condamine From the Downs in June 1844 Gilbert wrote to Gould:
Clearly impressed by the parrot’s beauty—no less than four ‘beautifuls’ in as many lines—Gilbert posted a description to Gould, adding that the bird assembled in small families to feed in high grass and ‘the stomachs & crops were distended with grass seed’. It is hard to imagine the excitement that the new species aroused when specimens found their way to England. Australia was settled at the height of a period of intense interest in the resources of the natural world. A passion for natural history gripped the upper classes and provided income and employment to the lower classes and colonists. The beautiful new parrot quickly became part of the latest craze for exotica, a rare jewel from the colonies to grace the menageries and drawing rooms of the wealthy, and a prize for museums. The prevailing attitude is well expressed by Gould:
Gilbert stayed on the Darling Downs until September, when he packed up his accumulated specimens and sent them to Frederick Strange, a fellow collector with whom he had stayed in Sydney, enclosing a letter asking him to forward them to Gould in London and noting that ‘the only thing new in the collection is the parrot I mentioned to you in a former letter, and some smaller Quadrupeds’ . Gilbert apologised for sending so small a collection, explaining that he had ‘determined on joining Dr Leichhardt’s overland expedition; would you not like to go? I am sure you will agree that such an opportunity of collecting the treasures on the inland should not be lost sight of’.
Gilbert met explorer Ludwig Leichhardt on the Downs and convinced the reluctant doctor that he needed an ornithologist on the forthcoming Port Essington expedition. However, Gilbert’s determination to join Leichhardt was ultimately ill-fated; on June 1845 at the base of Cape York he was killed by an Indigenous spear. One of the few items Leichhardt returned with after that unfortunate expedition was Gilbert’s tiny diaries. Although they cover the period from March 1844, when Gilbert set off for the Downs, until his death, the pages are mainly occupied by daily entries from The diaries are faint, overwritten, and extremely hard to read in places, but a small army of devotees has almost completely transcribed them. The diaries tell us something about the distribution of the parrot before the land was settled by Europeans. Gilbert recorded the paradise parrot as ‘New’ or ‘Platycercus New’, at six localities on their way north. Leichhardt’s journal refers to the parrot as ‘Mr Gilbert’s parrot’ (‘Mr Gilbert’s parrot, which he first met with on the downs’). They last saw Mr Gilbert’s parrot the day before Christmas, on the Comet
Six months later, Gilbert again encountered his parrot on the Mitchell River: ‘I was surprised today, to meet with my new Platycercus of the Downs, a species which has not been observed with us since leaving deception Camp on Comet Creek.’ Within days, he recorded sighting great numbers of the bird, and was fatally speared by Indigenous people incensed by a dispute over their women. I have no doubt that he in fact saw the very similar golden shouldered parrot. Gilbert was exhausted, lacked field glasses and was accustomed to hands-on identification of specimens. Others have doubts and still hope for some undiscovered population of paradise parrots, 400 kilometres north of their known range and plumb in the heart of golden shouldered parrot country. Still others have exploited Gilbert’s observation deliberately to mislead. In November 1844, Strange shipped Gilbert’s box to Gould. By the time he received it, Gould had already described and named Mr Gilbert’s New Platycercus, verbatim, from the information in Gilbert’s letter, which described only the first specimen collected, an adult male. Gould soon illustrated the parrot in Part V of his work in progress, The Birds of Australia (1840–48). The painting is unusual because it shows two males on a bare branch, illustrating not only the new species but also Gould’s lack of information. Typically, Gould showed both sexes, with some indication of habitat and behaviour. Gould ended his paper to the February 1845 meeting of the Royal Zoological Society, ‘For this beautiful species I propose the name Psephotus pulcherrimus’. And for a time it was known as, no surprises here, the beautiful parrakeet. So, alas, poor Gilbert did not get his wish. In December 1844, in a draft letter that Gilbert never received because of his death (or perhaps Gould never sent it), Gould explained, ‘I am especially delighted about the new Platycercus … As I have lately named Pachycephala Gilbertia, I cannot with propriety add your name to this New Bird’. He went on to point out that, as Gilbert knew, he did not approve of that kind of nomenclature. Clearly, Gould was miffed by Gilbert’s failure to send a flat skin of the bird with his letter, which he requested Gilbert do in future for ‘any very important new thing of moderate size … that is if it is a species one would not like to be forestalled in giving a name to’. We are not sure how many beautiful parrakeets Gilbert sent to Gould; at least one specimen has been rediscovered in the drawers of the museum at Harvard as the result of my enquiries. Three specimens still carry Gilbert’s original label and another four to six are prepared in the manner of Gilbert but lack data; they include various sexes and ages. In an interesting twist, three specimens were stolen from Gould in the year that he received them and, as far as is known, were never recovered. All attempts to turn the parrot into a self-perpetuating cagebird failed and, by the end of the nineteenth century, reports of captive birds virtually ceased. By 1915, prominent European aviculturists such as the Marquis of Tavistock were warning that other species should not be allowed ‘to vanish like the Paradise Parrot, which is another lovely thing we will never see again’. In Australia, A.J. Campbell, president of the Royal Australasian Ornithologists’ Union, was concerned that the parrot might be exterminated, and called for information and action. Journalist and keen birder Alec Chisholm took up the call. For the rest of his life Chisholm searched for the bird and championed it in print, beginning in 1918, when he published ‘Is It Lost?’ in the Brisbane Courier-Mail. In December 1921, after many false leads and wild goose chases, Chisholm received a letter from a farmer in the Gayndah area of Queensland. Cyril Henry Jerrard, a keen bush naturalist, had been sent by a friend Chisholm’s article ‘Is It Lost?’ and kept it. In Jerrard’s handwritten draft of an account of his experiences, kindly sent to me by his great-nephew Graham, he tells of hearing a strange bird call while out riding:
He remembered Chisholm’s words: ‘A long tailed and very pretty parrot … known to settlers as the ground parrot’. The following February, Jerrard found a pair at a nest, set up a hide and in March photographed the birds. These are the last and only photographs of the lost parrot. In 1936, Jerrard wrote to Chisholm to tell him that he had not seen any of the parrots for years. ‘ “Brinepool” has vanished—shall we sadly say forever? At least I have no record of him for the past eight years.’ Still, reports of the bird trickled out every now and then, triggering more sightings and the occasional expedition. As recently as the 1970s, Joe Mattinson, a large-scale Sydney aviculturist with an infamous reputation, claimed that he kept paradise parrots at a secret location in northern Queensland, producing a black-and-white photograph of a cage full of young birds as proof. Gilbert’s diary, with his mistaken identification on the Cape, was a handy reference to cite to doubters—while the southern population might be extinct, there was a secret northern one from which to harvest birds. After some years, with tears in his eyes, Mattinson reported that all were lost in a tragic fire … on other occasions it was a tremendous flood. A decade later, one of Mattinson’s friends bought an old set of British avicultural magazines and came across the photograph. It was taken in 1943 at a breeding establishment in England and captioned ‘A family of young many-colour parrots’, now known as mulga parrots. PENNY OLSEN is a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University. She has published several books, most recently Feather and Brush: Three Centuries of Australian Bird Art, and continues to work on her book on the lamented paradise parrot |
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