A small, quail-like bird species called the plains-wanderer hasn’t been seen in west Melbourne for decades — but thanks to new artificial intelligence technology, the bird has finally been heard.
In a flash of genius, Zoos Victoria, a zoo-based conservation organization, installed audio recorders throughout the wilds of Australia, in an effort to catalog data on local bird calls.
Across tens of thousands of hours of recordings, an AI-powered tool pinpointed the plains-wanderer by identifying its soft, low “ooming” call at two sites in western Melbourne.
Remarkably, the bird hadn’t been found in the volcanic region since 1989 — a symptom of the species’ larger decline across the country due to long-term drought and its ever-shrinking natural habitat.
Chris Hartnett, Zoos Victoria’s threatened species program coordinator, specializes in bringing species back from the brink of extinction.
Currently, she is committed to recovery actions for 27 priority species that have been flagged for extinction in the next 10-20 years — and the plains-wanderer is one of them.
For Hartnett, finding evidence of the plains-wanderer in the region was “like finding gold.”
“They’re very endearing and quite eccentric,” Hartnett told the Guardian, explaining that the females form “a shape with her wings like a jet plane and chase the males around” when courting mates.
Plains-wanderers are outliers in the avian world, as the females are larger and more colorful than their male counterparts and habitually take it upon themselves to defend their territory while their mates tend to the eggs.
Notably, as a “flagship” species, the bird is used as an indicator of healthy grasslands throughout southeastern Australia. They also play a crucial role in insect control and seed dispersal, which in turn leads to healthier habitats for other native species.
But, above all, Hartnett admires the species’ resilience.
“They’ve held on, even though the landscape has changed pretty drastically,” she said, pointing out that less than 1% of their natural habitat remained in Victoria.
That trademark “resilience” is especially remarkable, given the plains-wanderers’ penchant for particular landscapes.
“We’ve often referred to the plains-wanderer as a ‘Goldilocks species,’” Harnett said, adding that the birds liked their grassland “not too dense, not too sparse, but just right.”
In 2023, renowned “birders” Ross and Melissa Gallardy described the plains-wanderer as “one of the hardest birds” to spot in all of Australia.
Echoing Harnett’s “Goldilocks” remark, the Gallardys emphasized that the birds “require native grasslands that fit a very specific description.”
“They are extremely picky when it comes to habitat, and they are very skilled at hiding in the tuffs of grass of their preferred terrain,” the couple noted in their blog, Budget Birders.
“To put the difficulty level of this bird in perspective, there is a guide in Australia who charges $900 just to go out and see this one bird.”
“They are notoriously hard to flush,” they added, to illustrate just how elusive the plains-wanderer was. “They are so good at running away that they much prefer to go that route. They will run away and hide before you ever even knew they were there.”
Although audio recorders have proved to be crucial in renewed efforts to find the bashful bird, Harnett invited locals to report any sightings of the plains-wanderer to Zoos Victoria as they broadened conservation research on the “oddball” species.
“We welcome anyone who thinks they may have seen one of these birds on their property to get in touch,” Harnett said. “And we can put these audio recorders out there.”
Header image via Dominic Sherony (CC BY-SA 2.0)
