Well said.
As alluded to above, I have come across ground parrots on several of the plateaux in the Budawangs where they are not officially recorded.
Like platypus, they are easy to see if you sit still and quietly in the right sort of country (in the case of g. parrots, this is sedgey-tussocky soggy ground on the slight depressions in the horizontal sandstone cap which forms the top of the mountains (known locally as 'hanging swamps'; in the case of platypuses, just about any freshwater creek in southeastern Aust., preferably on a pebbly creek bed)
The g. parrots are easy to hear, but you have to nearly tread on them to flush them.
There are very few people who sit still in national parks and state forests; bushwalkers, dirt bikes, horseriders or 4WDers are not likely to see either beastie.
mickw wrote:
My understanding is that feral cats have been around in the north and desert country alot longer than most of us think........longer than European settlement, ie 200odd years......I think the theory goes that cats came with visitors from Indo & Timor so we're talking >200yrs, maybe even 1000.....though I havent got the evidence in front of me, I just remember some stuff I read/heard 20 years ago in Biogeography lectures.
This was also my understanding, but it has recently been challenged (eg:
http://www.publish.csiro.au/?paper=WR01011; if you want the full paper let me know).
I have been studying the impacts of domestic cat predation on birds in Australia, and have been a bit surprised by what I have found. Most of the literature is on feral cats, rather than domestics and strays. The main prey item is mammals (about 50%) followed by birds and frogs/lizards (30%) then invertebrates & cetera. This is thought to be because they hunt mostly at night, when birds are less conspicuous. They consume more introduced than native prey in the 'mammal' and 'bird' categories; indeed, eradication of rats or rabbits without eradication of cats can lead to a massive upsurge in cat predation on native animals and local extinctions have resulted (mostly on islands after eradication of rats). Those stupid bloody bell collars
do actually work in reducing predation, particularly on birds, but the much vaunted 'trap-neuter-release' programs do not. The paper in the link above is one of several to question the severity of the impact which cats are believed to have on our native birds.
mickw wrote:Broad scale domestication of a wide range of native animals thus displacing Dogs & Cats as preferred pets in Australian society
Hear, hear, well said old man, but how are we going to change the laws so that I can have a feather glider in my biggest aviary before I push up tulips?
The impact of trapping on populations of native birds is also believed to have been much more severe than it actually has been. The removal of a dozen pairs from any but the most endangered species would have less than a thousandth of the impact of natural predation, illness, extreme weather and so on.

Avid amateur aviculturalist; I keep mostly australian and foreign finches.
The art is long, the life so short; the critical moment is fleeting and experience can be misleading, crisis is difficult....... (Hippocrates)