Part One: The facts mate, and only the facts
Novelty in itself has attractions, but when with novelty, beauty and elegance are combined, the attractions are augmented beyond measure ….
John Gould, The Birds of Australia, 7 volumes, 1840 to 1848.
John Gould was describing the Gouldian Finch, Amadina gouldiae, shortly after his wife and collaborator Elizabeth Gould passed away in 1841 and after whom the bird was named.
The Gouldian was first found—by western scientists at least—in 1840 by John Gilbert, Gould’s collector of biological specimens, at Greenhill Island in the Van Dieman’s Gulf, 150 or so kilometres northeast of Darwin.
For 150 years the Gouldian—nowadays with the scientific name of Erythrura gouldiae—was no more than a rainbow-coloured Holy Grail of Australian birdwatching. There are only a few sites where you have a good chance of spotting one and they’re mostly in hard-to-get-to remote parts of the Northern Territory.
Outside of birdwatching circles the Gouldian’s public profile was as diminutive as its size and population.
That all changed in May 2022 when, after two very dry wet seasons, a flock of around 150 birds turned up at the proposed Defence Housing Australia (DHA) development at Binybara/Lee Point in Darwin’s northern suburbs.
Those numbers persisted for six months or so after which numbers settled down to single or low double digits, most likely because the Gouldians found better foraging and breeding grounds back in their traditional territories in the savanna woodlands south of Darwin.
The DHA development is the latest tranche of a long-term housing project it has co-developed in Darwin that has created two new suburbs; Muirhead, with 780 homes; and Lyons, named after Larrakia traditional owner Tommy Lyons, with 720 homes.
The Binybara/Lee Point development will eventually comprise 800 new homes for the growing Top End Defence population and the broader Darwin community.
The arrival of the Gouldians at Binybara/Lee Point was the opportune trigger for a sustained—and misleading—scare campaign run by a rag-tag coalition opposed to the DHA development.
As recent Court decisions have shown there can be serious consequences for organisations and individuals that make spurious claims, manipulate evidence or promote false information in legal proceedings and public campaigns.
The Gouldian’s legal status as “Endangered” is based on the listing since 2000 under the Commonwealth Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (1999) (the EPBC Act).
Notwithstanding that legal imprimatur, and without exploring concerns about the EPBC’s validity and rigour—though the trenchant criticisms by the Environmental Defenders Office in this 2022 report are useful in the present context—it is worthwhile examining Gouldian threat assessments from other jurisdictions and NGOs.
In the Northern Territory it is listed as “Vulnerable” under the Territory Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act 1976; in Queensland the Nature Conservation Act 1992 records it as “Endangered” and in Western Australia it is a “Priority” species under that state’s Biodiversity Conservation Act (2016).
For mine the assessment of non-government agencies—perhaps because they are nimbler and less bound by bureaucratic requirements—can provide a better assessment of the Gouldian’s status, prospects for recovery and threats the species may face.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species records the Gouldian at its lowest risk assessment of “Not Threatened”. While widely considered a ‘vital resource’ the Red List is not without its critics and the IUCN suffers from similar resource constraints as government agencies.
Curiously, the peak Australian birding body Birdlife Australia lists the Gouldian as “Endangered” while the world-wide equivalent organisation Birdlife International says it is of “Least Concern”.
Go figure. So, how to account for these disparities?
We’ll try to address that in Part Two, to follow.
