VERY few people have ever seen Australia’s extremely rare Eastern Ground Parrot, noted for its beauty. They are found only in dense thickets of bush on a few patches of heath country along the eastern seaboard.

Shy and secretive, making their tunnels and nests in the undergrowth, Ground Parrots are almost impossible to find.

Until now. Traditionally the only way to find a ground parrot or to monitor their density has been to listen at dusk for their calls or have a line of a dozen or more people beating through the scrub to flush them out. Even then, they only fly briefly before scurrying back into their hiding places. They would much rather walk than fly.

But Australian scientists are forging the use of new technology which will allow them to map the numbers and whereabouts of some of Australia’s most threatened wildlife _ referred to as “cryptic” species because they are so hard to see and so little is known about them.

The Barren Grounds Nature Reserve on the Illawarra escarpment south of Sydney is one of the only places where the Eastern Ground Parrots, which resemble giant green budgerigars with black and yellow flecking and a red bar on their forehead, are found in any significant numbers. Even then visitors and bird enthusiasts are very hard put to find them.

Dr Elizabeth Tasker from the NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change is pioneering the use of a new machine known as the Song Meter, sophisticated listening devices which can be left in the bush for months at a time and pre-programmed to record at specific times of the day. The machines can be programmed to automatically adjust to the shifting seasons, so at Barren Grounds for instance, the Song Meter will record for about an hour at sunset.

The project, known as the Automated Acoustic Monitoring of Threatened Fauna study, is being funded by the Foundation for National Parks and Wildlife. It builds on a previous study with the UNSW, University of Wollongong and Hawkesbury-Nepean Catchment Management Authority.

The Song Meters were developed in the US and have only begun to be used around the world over the past year. Australian scientists are among the first to use it as a monitoring tool for rare and endangered species.

The key advance on previous audio monitoring is that the new equipment is compact and lightweight and the call recognition software is easily adaptable to identify new species.

By placing several of the Song Meters in an area, the data received can be triangulated to identify exactly where the birds are and their likely numbers. Software being developed at the University of Wollongong will allow signals from multiple stations to be combined to help locate the animals.

Ultimately the technology could have many different uses; including expanding the hunt for the mysterious Night Parrot of Central Australia, closely related to the Eastern Ground Parrot but feared extinct. Like the Ground Parrot, its rarity and shy and secretive behaviour in remote areas has until now made it extremely expensive to research. “Ornithologists have been searching for the Night Parrot for years, but it is just so rare the chance of being in the right place at the right time is very small,” Dr Tasker said. “It may turn out not to be extinct; and these units are our best chance to find out whether it has survived.”

Disputes between conservationists and developers over whether threatened species exist on a particular site could also be resolved through its use.

Dr Tasker said if the Ground Parrot study proved successful, the technology had great potential to be used across a range of species, particularly birds and frogs because of their distinctive calls. The even rarer Eastern Bristlebird, said to look and behave more like a bush rat than a bird, is likely to be next.

But all that is in the future. The Ground Parrots at Barren Grounds, where their calls can be heard at dawn and dusk, are the first species to be monitored in this manner.

Dr Tasker said the power of the power of this tool is that it greatly broadened their ability to study rare and cryptic species. “In studying rare animals you are really limited to where and how often you can get access, so surveys tend to be along roads,” she said. “But a lot of habitats, such as for the Ground Parrot, have no ready access.

“Another beauty of the technology is you can leave these passive listening devices out for weeks or months. The software can sift through months of recordings in minutes, giving you a much better idea of how many birds are there.”

The old fashioned method of counting Ground Parrots by flushing them out or by listening for them has already indicated there has been a steady decline in numbers since the last fires swept through Barren Grounds in 1983. The birds are fire sensitive, increasing rapidly in number after a fire because of the diversity of vegetation that thrives after a burn.

It was Dr Tasker’s work as a fire ecologist which led to her interest in Ground Parrots. She said knowing the fire thresholds for threatened species was essential for their management and survival, with the relationship of many frogs to fires being particularly poorly known.

“There are a whole bunch of these cryptic species threatened by fire; either they need fire for maintenance of diversity of vegetation, or they are easily damaged by it. How often bushland is burnt makes a real difference to what species survive.

“This research can help us determine, for instance, when conducting a controlled burn how much of an area should be burnt at any one time.”

Research assistant Jessica Bryant, who did her Honours degree in science on the impacts of walking dogs on birds, said there had been very little work done on the impact of fire on Australian animals. “The only way we can determine the appropriate fire regime is to know more about the populations. There is a big gap in our knowledge of threatened species.

“Traditional techniques were very labour intensive.”

Funder of the project, Leonie Gale, CEO of the Foundation for National Parks and Wildlife, said the project could revolutionise the way threatened species were monitored, located and protected.

“There is really very little money around for scientific research and remarkably little is known about Australias rarest critters,” she said. “Government will often not fund these sorts of projects because they are high risk, they aren’t proven and might not work. We fund the iffy stuff, the catalysing projects. I was inspired by the credentials of those proposing the project. This is a real first. It is not being done anywhere else in the world.

“Other organisations set aside land for these species that they fence off to keep the animals safe and study them in what resembles their original native environment, but rather than looking at animals like specimens in a petri dish our focus is on learning about the animals in the wild, where they have to cope with many threats and changed habitats.

“By using acoustic monitoring we can find out where these animals are without intrusion and can work out how many are present in any particular location.

“Australia will lose many species in the next 30 years; this is a remote management tool for threatened species which could help stop that happening.”