The open water migration of three rare parrots

These are the Swift Parrot and the Orange-Bellied Parrot, which are both critically endangered, and the Blue-Winged Parrot, which has just been listed as vulnerable.

It is probably not a very good strategy (to have to migrate large distances across open water), but it is what they have to do in a post-Pleistocene world, where we have Bass Strait.

They have to get down here to their breeding areas. During the Pleistocene, they could fly across the Bassian Plain, but now they've got to come across water.

We don't really know a great deal about whether these birds, such as the Swift Parrots, die, during their migration. We do know that a lot of Orange-Bellied Parrots die during the non-breeding season and maybe migration is a problem, but we know very little about Swift Parrots in that regard.

The stretch of open water that they're going across is about 300 km, but that's only a three or four hours flight. So it shouldn't really be that much of a problem. Some birds do much longer migrations than that. There are lots of birds that migrate for days and days without eating, and get through. So it isn’t clear whether the actual migration is a problem or not, but it's interesting that it is migratory parrots that seem to be in trouble.