Wildlife

Australian Birds under Threat

A worrying number of Australia’s birds are nearer to extinction than they were a decade ago due to climate change and bushfires, researchers say.

Habitat loss and feral animals are also pushing the 216 threatened bird types closer to being wiped out, a Charles Darwin University and BirdLife Australia report found.

Birds such as the fernwren and golden bowerbird have been forced towards mountaintops as rising temperatures affect their rainforest habitat in Queensland’s tropics. All told, 96 bird types became more threatened in the past 10 years.

Among the 77 species threatened by the increasing number of bushfires, 26 were made more threatened by the Black Summer blazes in 2019-20. This includes 16 on Kangaroo Island in South Australia, almost half of which was burned by an out-of-control bushfire. The tiny Kangaroo Island southern emu wren is among them.

More than 90 bird species have also been affected by more frequent and severe droughts and heatwaves across the nation in the past decade. That list includes one of Australia’s rarest birds: the mukarrthipi grasswren of central western NSW, a species with only two or three pairs left.

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