Rye Park wind farm - superb parrot project

Concerns for the health of the Superb Parrot population stem from recent genetic analysis in the ACT by Stojanovic et al. (2023) that reveal strict monogamy, strong philopatry, and poor recruitment of young into the adult breeding population. In this system, the total breeding output of Superb Parrots was attributable to only 34 Superb Parrot breeding pairs, of which 13 bred repeatedly and produced 60% of nestlings born into the study area. Five of these repeat-breeding pairs produced 28% of all nestlings. This represents significant reproductive skew in the ACT population size, which is an early warning sign of low effective population size and inbreeding. This result flags poor nestling survivorship as a potential threat to Superb Parrot persistence. It is not known whether these findings are representative of the population genetic health of the species.