The government of Australia has pledged a $10,000 donation to Friends of the Western Ground Parrot to help conserve the critically endangered “shy and rarely seen” species to mark the coronation of King Charles III.
Making the announcement, the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said that he was pleased to mark the coronation with the national contribution as “His Majesty King Charles III has long championed conservation and sustainability.”
According to reports, the parrot was once found 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 that the call from the prime minister’s office “came out of the blue”. He also said that the charity did not know how it was selected.
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King Charles will receive the charity’s congratulations and “quite possibly” merchandise, such as the western ground parrot lapel pin, Wettin said.
In his reaction, Sean Dooley, national public affairs manager for BirdLife Australia, said that the parrot – “so precariously balanced on the edge of extinction” – was very deserving of the attention.
However, Dooley also had his own theory about 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 southwest.
Recall that 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 day’s premier, David Bland, helped see it declare a nature reserve in 1967.
A report on the 2015 edition of the Birdlife Australia magazine showed that the Duke expressed concern about the western ground parrot, which had once inhabited the Two Peoples Bay nature reserve when he was presented with a plaque commemorating his work preserving the species on his final visit to Australia in 2011.
Dooley said that 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.”
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
