Scientists from the Australian National University have found two birds believed to be near extinction on an island off Tasmania.
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Researcher Dr Matthew Webb said the team had sighted the King Island brown thornbill and the King Island scrubtit during a trip in March.
"This was a case of really crossing our fingers and hoping they're still persisting, and finding a few new locations was really fantastic," Dr Webb said.
The King Island brown thornbill is a sub-species of the mainland and Tasmanian species, but with a longer beak.
It is listed as the bird most likely to go extinct in Australia in the next 20 years, Dr Webb said.
The Difficult Bird Research Group found small populations of both birds, with scrubtit numbers under 50 and the thornbill between 25 and 30.
"Now that we realise that we've actually got a population there it's a viable option for us to roll out ground actions that protect species," Dr Webb said.
"That's going to involve things like increased habitat protection, habitat augmentation [and] trying to increase the quality of the habitat."
Both birds have faced massive losses of habitat made worse by bushfires, including the 2007 fire which burned 90 per cent of the scrubtit's remaining habitat.
King Island had already suffered many vertebrate and invertebrate extinctions, Dr Webb said.
"At some point we really just need to draw a line in the sand and say we're going to stop this here," he said.
Dr Webb said fieldwork on scrubtit numbers was at least five years old and no exact study had been done to document thornbill numbers.
Both had been thought to have lived only in specific forest locations on the island with the thornbill even harder to find.
"It has been mostly twitchers or researchers that are interested in birds. They've been going to this forest block location and occasionally a couple of times people found one [a thornbill]," Dr Webb said.
"Most people hadn't been able to find them."
He said the group's new methodology had helped it find the elusive birds by making short, repeated visits to sites and either sighting the birds or recording calls only they could make.
But it wasn't just the enigmatic nature of the birds weighing down Dr Webb and his colleagues. In the forests the birds called home it could take 20 minutes to travel short distances through masses of fallen logs and impenetrable scrub.
"On top of that, to make the whole experience more pleasurable, there's millions of leeches," Dr Webb said.
"A normal day surveying for the bird probably involves picking off 50 or so tiger leeches."
Dr Webb said he was glad to be home but it had been worth it to find the thornbill.
"From a distance they're not anything remarkable," he said.
"When you see them up close they're actually quite beautiful little birds."
He said the King Island thornbill's long beak set it apart from its more mainland or Tasmanian relatives, but there was little research on how genetically different they actually were.
"This is Australia's most likely bird to go extinct in 20 years and we know nothing about it," he said.
The survey was a collaboration between the university, Bird Life Australia, the Tasmanian government and the Cradle Coast Natural Resource Management Group.
