Pullen Pullen reserve in western Queensland where the night parrot was re-discovered in 2013. Credit:Annette Ruzicka Mr Leseberg said he will use his Australian Academy of Science's Max Day Award, which provides up to $20,000 in support, to use GPS tracking to build a better understanding of how the "fat budgies", as he calls them, get around. "(We know) they live in semi arid Australia - the landscape with lots of open plains, lots of escarpments, low hills," he said. "That is where they hide out during day in the spinifex and at night they fly out onto flood plains to feed. "What we are going to try and do is to capture four birds, put GPS tags on them, find out where they are going at night, what resources they are using, what parts of the landscape they are living in."

Mr Leseberg lucked into finding the young night parrot, startling it out of a spinifex hummock, as he passed by. Credit:Nick Leseberg According to research conducted by Dr Steve Murphy, who played a key role in verifying the discovery of the population by John Young in 2013, the bird can travel at least 40 kilometres a night, which means tracking their flight patterns was crucial, Mr Leseberg said. "We know they need spinifex, we also might find out they need a particular habitat to feed in, (the question then is) are there areas where those two habitats are in close proximity that the bird could be living in? Dr Steve Murphy performing surveys of the night parrot. Credit:Annette Ruzicka "We could map that across a wider area than just where they are found and say well these areas are similar in their spatial set up does that mean we could find them in this area too."

Sounds easy in theory, but finding the birds to tag them in the first place will be tough work. Dr Murphy's research team discovered night parrots make distinctive calls for about 10 minutes at dusk each night and so Mr Leseberg is planning on setting up audio recorders across various spinifex grasses in western Queensland to see if he can capture the bird's calls and pinpoint their locations. "We know we can track them down by their calls, so if you listen in an area with spinifex you might hear the bird calling...we also know they tend to occupy an area for a long period of time, there are patches of spinifex where some night parrots have been coming back to spots for years," he said. "The trick is finding those spots and that is where the acoustic monitoring comes in "As one person, I can't go to every single patch of spinifex to listen out at dusk.

"So with these recorders, I can put them out and monitor lots of patches of spinifex over time and try to find out where the birds are….once we find one of those (permanent) spots, it is relatively easy to catch them." Mr Leseberg hopes his habitat modelling will contribute to better protecting the endangered species. "Up to now is we haven't known how to take them into consideration (for Environmental Impact Assessments)," he said. "If you know there is an endangered species that you are concerned about that could be on the area you are doing an EIS for, then you have to search for that species...for most species, you know how to search for them...the thing with the night parrot is we didn't know how to look for it. "It wasn't being considered not because people were deliberately saying I don't care about the night parrot, it was a simple case of we would consider the night parrot if we knew how.

"Because we know now what they sound like, we know a little bit more about their habits... in situation where there is an assessment going on in a place where the night parrot might be, we now know how to thoroughly search for them to determine whether they are or are not there."