![]() Photograph: Cyril Jerrard/National Library of AustraliaĬhisholm, McGregor recounts, wrote that the average private collector “is a relic of barbarism and a perversion of civilisation. But portents for their nesting were grim once they abandoned the nest, Jerrard discovered, their eggs were rotten.Ī male Paradise parrot at the entrance to its nest, photographed in 1922. It was the first time the birds had ever been photographed. On 18 March 1922, Jerrard sent Chisholm photos of the birds on their termite mound nest. Jerrard soon saw the pair again – with perhaps six others he assumed were their chicks. On 11 December 1921, Jerrard told Chisholm he had identified a pair of the birds. In 1917 as a 27-year-old Brisbane-based journalist, Chisholm set out to determine if the parrot still lived. I also became intrigued by the extent to which his fame faded in his old age and after his death.” “In some ways it was like conservation today in some ways very different. “I became intrigued by the ways in which he tried to cultivate a conservationist ethos in the public by encouraging an emotional connection with nature, especially birds,” McGregor told Guardian Australia. McGregor’s book about Chisholm – Idling in Green Places: A Life of Alec Chisholm – was shortlisted for the 2020 National Biography awards. It also looks at the conservation legacy of Alec Chisholm, a campaigning amateur ornithologist and one of Australia’s most popular pioneering nature writers, who helped rediscover the Paradise parrot before chronicling its swift demise. McGregor’s paper charts the rediscovery of the paradise parrot 100 years ago when Cyril Jerrard sighted a pair of the distinctive birds on his property near Gayndah in the Burnett district of Queensland. Alec Chisholm (right) with Prof Sydney Skertchly in Queensland around 1920, when Chisholm was still searching for the Paradise parrot. ![]()
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