Australia’s orange-bellied parrot is so rare, it’s estimated less than 200 of them can be found in the wild. For years, the governments of South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania have worked with conservationists to protect the critically-endangered bird. They’ve found that saving the species may not necessarily be synonymous with saving the environment.

For the past year the parrot has been an environmental obstacle to the planned $3.1 billion AUS desalination plant to be built off Victoria’s coastline.

If the plan goes through, the plant could be operational by 2011. Unfortunately for the plant’s developers, however, the facility might be built within two kilometers of the parrot’s winter feeding grounds.

(The desalination plant also threatens other colorfully named species such as the glossy grass skink, the southern brown bandicoot and the growling grass frog, but the bird is really the center of all the attention.)

Two years ago, the orange-bellied parrot delayed the development of a wind farm near Melbourne. At the time, the parrot was spotted five kilometers from the farm’s boundaries. Then federal environmental minister Ian Campbell interceded on the parrot’s behalf. “They've said that … by approving it, I would bring this bird closer to extinction,” he was quoted as telling an Australian radio program.

The wind farm was eventually approved after a third-party report estimated that, given the parrot’s usual migratory patterns, the wind farm’s location threatened approximately 1 parrot every thousand years. Campbell left his position not long afterward.

As politician Russell Broadbent put it, "The bird has already cost one minister his job."

The question is, will it cost Aussies their drinking water?