Spending four weeks in Tasmania's remote south-west observing the critically endangered orange-bellied parrot is a dream come true for Ella Roles and Peter Attard.
The friends have settled into life in Melaleuca — the only place where the migratory parrots breed in the wild — for their first stint volunteering for the Orange-Bellied Parrot Tasmania Program.
"It's really nice just to live really basic and slow and I just love it."
Mr Attard said that waking up each day to the mountains was "pretty lovely".
With bushwalkers stopping at Melaleuca and some semi-permanent residents, life is also very social.
"You'd think that this role would be really solitary and you'd just get to hang out with each other and that's it, but you get to meet so many people," Ms Roles said.
They are also getting to know the birds.
"They all have different personalities," Mr Attard said.
There are three feed tables at Melaleuca, and Ms Roles and Mr Attard rotate between them, making observations for two hours in the morning and evening.
They clean the tables after morning observations and top up the feed containers, travelling between the monitoring sites on bicycles.
"The work the volunteers do is amazing and so critical to us being able to measure what's happening with the population," wildlife biologist Shannon Troy said.
Dr Troy said there were several reasons why people signed up to volunteer for the program.
"Some people just really like birds and really like watching birds, other people want to contribute and make a positive change in the world, some people like the challenge of trying to help recover a threatened species," she said.
Dr Troy has recently returned from checking nests at Melaleuca. Some females were still laying nests, but Dr Troy said there were others already with young between one and seven days old.
When they are a bit older, the nestlings are banded, which identifies them for life, and a blood sample is taken to give scientists information about disease.
Orange-bellied parrots spend winter in Victoria and South Australia before migrating south to breed.
There are 115 specially made nest boxes in trees around Melaleuca, and in the past six or seven years, the parrots have nested in those boxes rather than natural nests in tree hollows.
"We are hoping for some natural nests at some point as the population continues to expand," Dr Troy said.
"We'll be able to tell that because we'll start to have juveniles turn up at the feed table and they won't have leg bands so we'll know that we haven't found their nest, and that will be an important sign of recovery when that happens."
This is Dr Troy's eighth year working on the program.
Away from Melaleuca, there are several projects underway to help the parrot. In Tasmania, they include the captive breeding centre outside Hobart where the birds are bred for release into the wild to bolster the population.
Once the wild birds start leaving Melaleuca in autumn, the Wildcare Friends of the Orange-Bellied Parrot group is hoping to track their migration.
Last year the group did two orange-bellied parrot migration surveys — one near Strahan on the west coast in autumn and another further north at Arthur River in winter — the first of their kind.
"There hasn't been a lot done on the actual migration route for orange-bellied parrots in Tasmania," the group's president, Marianne Gee, said.
This year, the group is planning six surveys, which will involve pairs or small groups of volunteers looking for orange-bellied parrots in specific locations on Tasmania's west coast.
Dr Troy said the surveys were a valuable source of information about the parrots.
"There's similar work being done on the mainland at similar times, so it gives us a picture of the bird across their whole range, [and] the timing of their movement," she said.
Five years ago there were just 17 birds in the wild. In December, 70 birds were counted at Melaleuca, breaking the previous year's record of 51 birds.
"The things that are working now are working because there's a lot of intensive management effort, but what we're aiming for is a self-sufficient population that doesn't require as much management intervention.
"And we're also aware that one or two bad seasons for things, not necessarily in our control, could cause the species to decline again.
It is work that Ms Roles and Mr Attard hope to continue to be involved in.
"I'd definitely like to make this a regular thing, to come back and volunteer for the program," Ms Roles said.
