It’s hard to say precisely when I became a card-carrying bird nerd. Perhaps it was when I began keeping a pair of binoculars in my bag (you know, “just in case”). Maybe the time I taught bush kinder children the local bird calls so we could chat to our feathery friends out on country. Most likely, though, it was the point at which I became hopelessly obsessed with a little bird named mukarrthippi and its entanglement with my family history.
Mukarrthippi (pronounced mook-waa-tippy) captured my heart, not just because of its charismatic rufous-brown eyebrows, alert upturned tail and striking white streaked body, but also for the rather dubious honour it holds of potentially being Australia’s rarest bird. A recent survey estimates that fewer than 20 individuals exist in the world, most of whom reside in a single small area of sandhill in what is now known as Yathong Nature Reserve.
Back when my dad was a boy, this area was known simply as Yathong Station, a vast 250,000-acre sheep station built on the dry, sprawling mallee country of central New South Wales. More than two generations of my family lived and worked at Yathong from the late 1890s onwards. My great-great-grandmother’s people, the Ngiyampaa-Wangaaypuwan, were there for millennia before that and no doubt witnessed the decimation of the landscape under the cloven feet of sheep herds and subsequent waves of feral rabbits and goats that arrived in plague proportions after colonisation.
These days an enormous predator-proof fence encircles more than 40,000 hectares of Yathong, which is categorised as an asset of intergenerational significance, a classification that allows the NSW Parks and Wildlife Service to prioritise rapid intervention strategies in response to emerging ecological threats. These interventions have provided some much-needed relief for mukarrthippi, which prefers building dome shaped nests among the spinifex grass at ground level, making it particularly vulnerable to predation by feral cats and foxes.
This “little bird of the spinifex” (as it translates from the local Ngiyampaa language) is not out of the woods yet. A recent conservation report on the species stated that it is plausible that the entire habitat of this tiny, localised population could be extinguished within a single fire event – which, with ongoing droughts and lack of regular fire management regimes, has become an ever-increasing possibility.
With the future of the little mukarrthippi hanging in the balance, it feels more important than ever that all of us begin to connect with the native species in our area and the ecosystems that support them. With an estimated one in six Australian birds currently under threat, it’s likely there’s a bird not too far from you that could be in the mukarrthippi’s place in just a few decades’ time.
So even if you’re not ready to proudly rock the title of “bird nerd” yet (give it time!), perhaps next time you’re out for a walk, when no one else is around, you might let loose your best bird call, and maybe forge a new connection with a local feathery friend.
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