TOP END ECOLOGY
Ecologist Cara Penton and photographer Kelly Dixon had trekked through tough, stone-country terrain in western Arnhem Land to a clearing among the spinifex. There, they put down a small, portable speaker connected by Bluetooth to Penton's mobile phone.
As they retreated to the shadows, the speaker emitted a confluence of chirps and tweets.
“We really didn't expect to see anything,” Penton says of the day, in 2022. “Then two birds scuttled out from the rocks. They were so curious and colourful, hopping about inspecting the speaker; it didn't take long before they realised they had been tricked and hopped back to the security of the rocks.”
It was a seminal moment for the scientist and the photographer: their first sighting of the bird Bininj Aboriginal people know as yirlinkirrkirr.
“That was the … only time I have seen yirlinkirrkirr in several years of working with Bininj people and wildlife on the Arnhem Land plateau,” Penton says. “I really look forward to the next time; it is such a beautiful and charismatic creature.”
Robust and long-tailed, and bedecked in bold chestnut, black and white feathers, yirlinkirrkirr (pronounced “yirl-in-git-git” in Bininj Kunwok language of western Arnhem Land) is an ornithological needle in a geographical haystack.
Also known as the white-throated grasswren, yirlinkirrkirr () was thought to be on the verge of extinction at the dawn of the 21st century. During the 1990s there were sightings of the bird along the Arnhem Land escarpment between Katherine, about 330 kilometres south-east of Darwin, and
