Australia is gifting King Charles III a donation to Friends of the Western Ground Parrot to mark his coronation.
The government has pledged $10,000 to help conserve the critically endangered “shy and rarely seen” species in honour of the monarch, on behalf of the people of Australia.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said he was pleased to mark the coronation with the national contribution as “His Majesty King Charles III has long championed conservation and sustainability.”
This will be our gift on behalf of the Australian people to King Charles III to mark his Coronation.
— Patrick Gorman MP (@PatrickGormanMP) May 3, 2023
This will provide national and international attention to the conservation of the Western Ground Parrot.
Known as Kyloring in Noongar, the parrot is critically-endangered. pic.twitter.com/LB4oD3PRmQ
The parrot was once found right across Western Australia’s southern coastal heathland, all the way from east of Esperance through to north of Perth – but today its numbers have been reduced to fewer than 150 birds at Cape Arid national park in the remote south-eastern corner of Western Australia.
Paul Wettin, the chair of Friends of the Western Ground Parrot, said the call from the prime minister’s office “came out of the blue”.
Wettin said the charity did not know how it was selected.
King Charles will receive the charity’s congratulations and “quite possibly” merchandise, such as the western ground parrot lapel pin, Wettin said.
Sean Dooley, national public affairs manager for BirdLife Australia, said the parrot – “so precariously balanced on the edge of extinction” – was very deserving of the attention.
However, Dooley also had his own theory as to why the western ground parrot was chosen to mark the coronation – due to King Charles’s family connections to the heathland birds of the state’s south-west.
King Charles’s father, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, championed the noisy scrub-bird when it was rediscovered at Two Peoples Bay, near Albany, shortly before the duke attended the 1962 Commonwealth Games in Perth.
The area was about to be gazetted for a township, but the Duke’s personal petition to the premier of the day, David Bland, helped see it declared a nature reserve in 1967.
When the duke was presented with a plaque commemorating his work preserving the species on his final visit to Australia in 2011, he also expressed concern about the western ground parrot, which had once inhabited the Two Peoples Bay nature reserve, according to a 2015 edition of the Birdlife Australia magazine.
Dooley said BirdLife has had “huge” concern for the bird and praised the countless thousands of hours the community group Friends of the Western Group Parrot has dedicated to protecting the species. “They really care a lot.”
The registered charity has successfully translocated 14 wild birds from Cape Arid to areas where they were previously common in 2021 and 2022.
The translocation of the species, which has lost 80% of its population to fires since 2009, Dooley said, is a “vital” way of ensuring their survival “so that one fire can’t take them out for ever”.
The bird had experienced a massive decline in range and population historically, which was then accelerated by feral cat numbers rising as an unintended consequences of a massive fox-baiting program in the 1990s, according to Dooley.
Bushfires then destroying habitat also made it easier for cats and foxes to prey on western ground parrots and Cape Arid’s become the only population left, he said.
The parrot is also a culturally significant bird to the Noongar people, who know it as the Kyloring.
It’s also part of the south-west of Western Australia, whose flora and fauna is one of the “hotspots of biodiversity in the world, not just Australia. So it’s an incredibly precious example of a diverse ecosystem that we’ve almost lost.
“Seeing another species drop out of that – and one that’s so beautiful – would be a tragedy not just for Australia but for the world,” Dooley said.
The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet said the gift “keeps with an emerging tradition of Australia marking significant royal occasions with support to the conservation of Australian native fauna”.
Past contributions have gone towards the conservation of the bilby, mountain pygmy possum, numbat and koala, the government said.
