endangered species

The poet, the premier and the frog

Environment / / 5 minutes of reading

It’s a story almost too preposterous to believe, starring a group of young uni students, an infamous state premier, a legendary Australian poet and an extinct frog which gave birth by vomiting its young – all at the dawn of the Australian conservation movement.

Yet the tale of the Southern Gastric-brooding Frog, which once inhabited the rainforest streams of the Conondale and Blackall ranges in south-east Queensland, continues to perplex and inspire a new generation of citizen scientists as they hop into FrogID Week.

On 23 November 1973, Chris Corben, his then-partner Anita Smyth, her sister Debbie and journalist Greg Roberts were young naturalists living in inner-city Brisbane. In a fish tank they held an unusual frog, which they’d collected from the Conondales a few weeks earlier.

This was during the Joh Bjelke-Petersen years, a repressive time in Queensland. “I was talking about the frog to some drug squad cops who tried to raid us,” Corben says. “They were asking me about grass. I told them you couldn’t feed her grass because she was insectivorous!”

Corben knew the frog by its scientific name, Rheobatrachus silus. It was new to science, described only months earlier by David Liem after its discovery the year before at Kondalilla Falls.…

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Bird of the year 2025: Vote 1 Shy Albatross

Environment / / 5 minutes of reading

In March, as Cyclone Alfred roared towards the south-east Queensland coast, the bayside suburbs of Brisbane were treated to a rare cold-water visitor. A Shy Albatross was spotted offshore, opposite a fishmonger in Sandgate. A couple of days later, what was likely to be the same bird flopped into a front yard of nearby Banyo, exhausted.

The bird was taken into care by seabird rescuers Paula and Bridgette Powers, better known as the Twinnies. “Banyo Alfred”, as they named their bird, was exhausted, emaciated and riddled with lice, as were hundreds of other birds the twins treated in the cyclone’s wake. Two months later, Alfie was well enough to be released back out to sea.

Which, on the face of it, sounds like a good news story. But let’s come back to it.

The Shy Albatross, Thalassarche cauta, is the only one of the world’s 22 albatross species to breed in Australia: on the fittingly named Albatross Island, off north-west Tasmania, and Pedra Branca and Mewstone, two stacks off the island’s south coast. All three spots are remote; the last two are impossible to access.

It is a majestic bird, with a wingspan of more than 2.5 metres.…

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Tracking the Australian Painted-snipe

Environment / / 4 minutes of reading

It had been three months without a peep, and the ecologist Matt Herring thought Gloria had perished. He had captured the elusive bird on 22 October 2023, on a property north of Balranald in New South Wales – the first Australian Painted-snipe to be fitted with a satellite tracker.

But contact had been lost, and there was a sticky complication: Gloria’s tracker had been financed by a successful crowdfunding campaign. Herring started preparing an obituary for the avian pioneer for her species.

And then she reappeared – more than 1,000km north of where she was first captured, near Birdsville in outback Queensland. Herring guesses the tiny solar panel on the two-gram tracker may have been obscured by one of the bird’s feathers, causing the outage.

The second Painted-snipe he’d caught, Marcelina, had made an even more epic journey from the same Balranald property. Captured on 3 January this year, she is now in Daly Waters in the Top End – a journey of more than 2,200km, as the Painted-snipe flies.

The Australian Painted-snipe is an enigmatic waterbird, most active from dusk to dawn. They hide in vegetation during the day, camouflaged by intricately patterned plumage. Almost all sightings are in summer, suggesting the species is at least partially migratory or nomadic.…

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In search of Australia’s newest mystery bird

Environment / / 6 minutes of reading

For 100 years, the Night Parrot was the undisputed mystery bird of Australian ornithology. Until the discovery and subsequent study of a tiny population in Queensland’s far west in 2013, two specimens found by the side of remote outback roads in 1990 and 2006, also in Queensland, were the only hard evidence of its continued existence.

With the parrot now present and accounted for, there remains one Australian bird that has never been photographed: the Buff-breasted Buttonquail. Like the Night Parrot, it has gone a full century undetected. The last undisputed record was a specimen shot by the legendary naturalist William McLennan near Coen in far north Queensland, in February 1922.

It may even be the first Australian bird condemned to extinction since the Paradise Parrot – yet another Queensland species, which was last seen alive in the 1920s.

Buttonquail are a small family of ground-dwelling, polyandrous species that resemble but are not closely related to “true” quail (part of a much larger group that also includes pheasants and chickens). Distributed from sub-Saharan Africa across Asia and Australia, buttonquail mostly live in grasslands, fly only when disturbed and are not often seen.

Despite its enigmatic status, the Buff-breasted Buttonquail (Turnix olivii) is not a sexy species.…

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Snail’s place

Environment / / 7 minutes of reading

In 1996, Dr John Stanisic, then curator of invertebrates at the Queensland Museum, was doing a routine environmental impact assessment near Taroom in southern central Queensland, some 380 kilometres north-west of Brisbane. The purpose of Stanisic’s survey was to check for rare and threatened species around an impoundment for the proposed Nathan Dam, on the Dawson River.

The dam was a controversial project in the district, as it would have flooded large areas of arable farmland. The usual arguments were trotted out about jobs for the local community. The water, it was said, would supply the needs of the local towns. Others suspected that the real reason was to service a proposed mine at nearby Wondoan, now in mothballs due to the tanking price of coal.

Stanisic and his team were checking an unusual habitat called boggomoss, where natural springs emerge from the Great Artesian Basin and create small lagoons in the otherwise dry semi-arid woodlands of the Brigalow Belt. One of his team, who was searching for isopods (which the rest of us know as slaters), unearthed a snail from the leaf litter. “I knew right away what it was,” Stanisic says. “It was like, Eureka!”

Stanisic, who goes by the name of the Snail Whisperer on his own website – he has discovered and described some 900 species since 1980 – had been searching for this particular mollusc for 10 years.…

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