Night parrot confections: the dangers of discovering the elusive

Works such as David Goodstein's On Fact and Fraud: Cautionary Tales from the Front Lines of Science (2010) show scientists as fallible creatures prone to careerism and the posterity disease. Discovery lust can muddle a scientist's integrity, a point encouraged by what Goodstein calls the Reward System and the Authority Structure. Rather than being high priests of fairness and objective research, they are as susceptible to manipulation and deceiving as any group.

The difference here is they do not necessarily see it in that light. In that cosmos, merit and manipulation can be seen to go hand in hand. The injection of "falsehoods into the body of science is rarely, if ever, the purpose of those who perpetrate fraud. They almost always believe that they are injecting a truth into the scientific method." Robert Millikan, for instance, manipulated his data, not so much to deceive as to reach the most accurate value for the charge of the electron. Young, in addition to his attempt at redemption, can be said to have done something similar, with his compulsive touching up of images, and his denial that he had captured the birds in question.

Nobel laureate physicist Richard P. Feynman, in his commencement address at the California Institute of Technology in 1974, offered a cardinal warning regarding scientific integrity: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.... After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that."

Young's greatest trickery was one played upon himself. The others, for a time, fell into his orbit, and even then, with some scepticism. He was never particularly good at maintaining a front for long. But for all that, there was enough to front the claim that The Night Parrot had been found, tantamount, as the editor of Birdlife Australia suggested, to "finding Elvis flipping burgers in an Outback roadhouse". A salutary tale to any future discoverer of the remarkable and doggedly elusive, and the dangers that entails.