John Young is an Australian naturalist and cinematographer.
Early life
John Young grew up on a farm for cattle and sheep in New South Wales. As a boy, he began egg-collecting with his brothers as a hobby. While in his twenties, Young held several jobs, including as an electrician, truck driver, and a fencer.
Career
In the 1990s, Young created John Young Wildlife Enterprises. The company ran birding tours and also produced wildlife films with the aim of documenting rare species of birds. In 2006, Young claimed to have photographed a new species of parrot in southern Queensland, calling it the blue-fronted fig parrot. A forensic expert suspected that some color of the bird'splumage had been altered, changing its brow from red to blue. Young maintains that he did not alter the colors, stating that he only lightened or darkened parts of the images. Young says he deleted the original photographs of the bird, which were requested by the forensic expert. In 2016, Young was hired as a senior biologist for the Australian Wildlife Conservancy. He resigned from his position in September 2018.
In 2013, Young rediscovered the night parrot, an endangered Australian bird. Live night parrots had not been definitively documented since 1912, though two dead ones were found in 1991 and 2006. However, the appearance of mesh in one of Young's photos raised questions as to how he was able to get pictures and videos of such a secretive bird. Young denies that he captured the individual, which would have been illegal. In 2019, the Australian Wildlife Conservancy published a report determining that some of Young's supposed observations were not credible. They determined that night parrot calls recorded by Young at Kalamurina Sanctuary were the result of playing publicly available call files near the detector rather than calls from an actual bird. Experts determined that an alleged night parrot nest photographed by Young contained fake eggs made of plaster or clay. As a result of their report, the AWC retracted Young's findings related to the buff-breasted buttonquail, another endangered Australian bird.
