Museum Victoria's long-deceased Night Parrot specimen. IT'S the avian equivalent of the Tasmanian tiger - a mysterious ground-dwelling parrot that looks a bit like a fat budgie. It's never been photographed alive and even glimpses of the night parrot - an almost mythical creature among Australia's birding fraternity - are as scarce as hen's teeth.
The only uncontested evidence of the species' continued existence, perversely, comes from (with apologies to Monty Python) a couple of ex-parrots: a road-killed adult collected in 1990, and a headless juvenile found below a barbed-wire fence in 2006. Both were collected in far western Queensland.
Now, the bird has been reported in Victoria for the first time since the 1950s - albeit belatedly in order to discourage hordes of hardcore twitchers from combing the spiky spinifex grasses that are its preferred habitat.
A Night Parrot; illustration by Steve Davidson. Chris Tzaros, an office-holder with Birdlife Australia, was on a weekend visit to the state's north-west in March with his wife and three-year-old child. Looking for nightjars at dusk, his attention was diverted by an unusual parrot that flew over his head. The view was less than perfect. Nonetheless, Mr Tzaros, who is 36 and has maintained a keen interest in birds since early childhood, knew immediately it was something he had never seen before. Then, he said, he started to shake.
"It takes a lot to get me to shake, and my eyes were actually watering as well, according to my wife," he said. "This thing came over and in a split second, I was like, really?
"My words to my wife were, what the bloody hell was that - which was a metaphorical expression; I had a bloody good idea what it was. I just didn't believe it."
Anecdotal records of the night parrot from Victoria have long been disputed. Unconfirmed sightings from last century come from Cowangie, east of Murrayville, and near Panitya to the north. In the late 1950s, a bushman recorded a series of sightings south of Tuyte.
While Mr Tzaros' sighting and location were initially suppressed, the National Night Parrot Network - set up to help gather what little information is known about the bird - was immediately informed.
"The risk of birdwatchers coming up and hunting this thing down was pretty high, so that's why the decision was made to not let the cat out of the bag completely,'' he said.
Infra-red cameras have been set up at water points near the sighting, in the hope of capturing the parrot on film.
Mr Tzaros admitted the inconclusive nature of the sighting nagged at him. "There will always be that element of doubt," he said. "But I'm still very confident what I saw was a night parrot."