The Case of the Headless Parrot

What may be the world's most mysterious bird has turned up - but the mystery has so far defied solution. Last year, ranger Robert Cupitt found the headless corpse of a small, drably-colored bird in Diamantina National Park, Queensland. It was a juvenile night parrot, a member of a species only very rarely reported and thought extinct by some authorities as long ago as 1915. Oddly (and inexcusably), it has taken months of delays and arguments between agencies and private groups to get a proper team set up to investigate the bird's survival. Birders blame the delay on a decision by the Queensland Environmental Protection Agency to keep the find quiet to avoid a flood of unqualified searchers coming in. That worked in the case of America's ivory-billed woodpecker, but in that case a search still began quickly.
Now the National Night Parrot Network will take up the cold trail and begin the arduous work of following up other sighting reports and searching for a "lost" avian species.