Painted or Buff-breasted? Buttonquail in the spotlight

Painted or Buff-breasted? Buttonquail, that is. The reputation for being Australia’s most mysterious bird has shifted from Night Parrot to Buff-breasted Buttonquail. The BBBQ is the only species of Australian bird not to have been definitively photographed to date: by that I mean that no images have been made publicly available or been publicly verified independently. No record of the species – one of a handful of birds endemic to the savannah woodlands (below) of Queensland’s Cape York Peninsula - has been backed by photographs or other solid evidence such as specimens since the 1920s, when birds were collected in the Coen area of central Cape York. The bird is known from just seven specimens.

University of Queensland researchers have looked for the BBBQ for the past three years without success; they fear the species may be on the brink of extinction. Two north Queensland naturalists with considerable field experience insist the BBBQ is thriving in at least one area. Most reports of the species from the past three decades have been from the Mareeba-Mt Mulligan-Mt Carbine region, which I will refer to as “southern Cape York” for the sake of convenience. I am among those who have long harboured doubts about the authenticity of many of these records. The area abuts the northern Atherton Tablelands and is well south of what is generally accepted as the biogeographical region of Cape York (below). Most sightings were fleeting flight glimpses; buttonquail and quail are notoriously difficult to identify in flight, especially in woodland or forest.

In a report earlier this year published by the Threatened Species Recovery Hub, University of Queensland PhD student Patrick Webster and colleagues put up a compelling argument for dismissing the many sightings based solely on brief flight views. The report makes a good case for arguing that buttonquail populations may have collapsed due to several factors including the introduction of cattle, changed fire regimes and feral predators. Critics say the authors went too far by effectively rejecting all records over recent decades from southern Cape York. As I reported earlier on this blog, following an outcry from birders offended by the questioning of records, the report was amended recently to concede more sightings may be authentic. I have been told of a handful of accounts of birds on the ground by experienced observers in southern Cape York that sound convincing, although none are recent. Now, well-known north Queensland naturalists John Young and Lloyd Nielsen say John has photographed BBBQ with camera traps at an undisclosed location. To wind the clock back a little, John had claimed, with Lloyd’s support, to have taken the first ever photographs of a BBBQ in 2018 – a bird in flight (screenshot below) - at the Australian Wildlife Conservancy’s Brooklyn Sanctuary near Mt Carbine. John has since agreed the image was not sufficiently clear for the public to be convinced of the bird’s identification.

Patrick Webster and colleagues have looked for BBBQ without success on Brooklyn and at other sites in southern Cape York – and elsewhere over Cape York Peninsula more generally - where birds were reported in recent decades. They found that Painted Buttonquail was widely distributed not only through southern Cape York – where that species has long been known and was thought to live side-by-side with BBBQ – but well to the north of this region in what we might call the heart of Cape York. The research team maintains this is not conclusive evidence that the BBBQ is no more and is continuing efforts to track down the species.

John and Lloyd insist that John’s latest images are the real deal: the first ever photographs of the BBBQ. Both gentlemen are highly experienced field naturalists with significant discoveries and records under their belt. John captured international attention when he found the Night Parrot and took the first ever photographs (above) of the species in what is now the Pullen Pullen Reserve in north-west Queensland in 2013. That was no small achievement. Lloyd has published numerous offerings which have substantially boosted our knowledge of north Queensland birds, such as the splitting of Cryptic and Graceful honeyeaters. John met me at my Sunshine Coast hinterland home earlier this month (below) to share a single image of what he is certain is a BBBQ. I am grateful for the opportunity he gave me to have a look. My immediate reaction was that the bird was indeed interesting. It did not look to me like a Painted, appearing too plain and brownish-buff rather than greyish. As I reported on my Facebook timeline, the bird to my eyes resembled a BBBQ based on field guide features. Among features I cited of interest were the relative absence of spotting, rufous-chestnut colouration along the back, and uniform brownish-grey rump and tail. However, I pointed out that the head and front of the bird were obscured in the image - which in any event was not sharp - so that crucial diagnostic features such as eye colour and bill length and size could not be seen. I could not therefore be certain of a BBBQ identification in my view.

I have never pretended to be a buttonquail identification expert and there are plenty of others who are more finely attuned than me in matters of forensic feather analysis. I was therefore somewhat surprised at the strength of the response to what was a short note on my personal Facebook timeline, not a public page. I was accused of being used as a “cover” by John to authenticate a record that some harboured doubts about. I was told I needed to “set the record straight”. More seriously, two defamatory memes were posted on the #BIRDHARD Facebook page. One depicted a caricature of John holding a gun to my head. The memes were quickly taken down by the page but for reasons best known to himself, John insisted on sharing them on Facebook, assuring they were seen by many more than would otherwise have been the case. John included in his post a suggestion that Patrick’s team was behind the memes, but there is no evidence for this.

I might add that various other memes (example above) on this Facebook page and elsewhere seem to me to be disrespectful and scornful of records sincerely believed in by some birders. As my friend Glen Ingram points out, humour is meant to be uplifting; it should not be about putting people down. Glen and I are among those birders, incidentally: we believe we saw BBBQ on the ground, up close and clearly, near Iron Range in 1984. In the wake of this hullabaloo, Patrick Webster published some useful photographs on Facebook; he has declined to allow me to reproduce them here. Other information has been provided by various observers, notably my friend Chris Corben, which helps to shine a line on BBBQ identification features. Some of Patrick’s images on Facebook demonstrate that the rich colouring on the upperparts of a Painted can be more extensive with females in the breeding season than is generally believed to be the case; the colouring was widely considered to be restricted to the shoulder area. Based on specimens photographed by Patrick, and on the Birds of the World illustrations (first and last images in this post ) - themselves modelled on the same photographs - the rump and upper tail of a BBBQ should be sandy-rufous rather than brownish-grey. It looks to be the case that a good feature for BBBQ is the relative absence of dark bars on the back and scapular feathers, so a BBBQ should appear more uniformly sandy-rufous in this area than Painted. However, this part of the bird was largely not visible in John’s photograph. The bird in John’s image, which has since been shown to other observers, shows wing coverts heavily spotted black and white; it has been suggested to me that BBBQ wing markings should show much less black, with essentially just white spots on a plain sandy-rufous background. John insists that several well-qualified observers have backed his assertion that the bird is indeed a BBBQ, but says these people do not wish to be identified. (So fraught are events surrounding this controversy that a degree of reticence to publicly join the fray is perhaps understandable.)

In light of these various exchanges, I asked John to again show me his photograph to refresh my memory as there remained features I considered to be of interest, including the relative absence of spotting on his bird other than on the wing coverts. John declined my request. Some reputable observers tell me my description fits Painted better than BBBQ. The eye colour in BBBQ should be yellow, not red (as in the Painted above), and the BBBQ bill should be longer and heavier. My view remains that it is not possible to be certain of the bird’s identity in the absence of images showing the key bill and eye colour features. At the end of the day, the central point of this matter is the absence of proof of eye colour and bill shape and size in John's image. John says those features are clearly visible in some of 15 colour images he obtained from his camera traps. He told me he has shared those images with Lloyd but nobody else. John says on Facebook: “Lloyd and I are totally happy we have Buff Breasted Button Quails and we are far from amateurs as some out there might think. We have decided to keep everything to ourselves now till we are ready…. We will just squirrel our info away from here on in till we are ready to reveal all.” I visited Lloyd twice at his Mt Molloy home (below) last week to discuss the BBBQ conundrum and other matters. Lloyd told me had seen just one image, which similarly to the one I was shown, did not show key identification issues; he has not seen an image showing the bird’s head. When I asked Lloyd to say for the public record how confident he was that we finally had an image of a BBBQ, he replied: “I’m convinced it’s a Buff-breasted from what I’ve seen in the field but I’d like to see a bit more of it. Having seen 20-odd Buff-breasted Buttonquail over many years, I’d say I’m 99 per cent sure.” Features he cited in support of this view were wing pattern (“not as streaky and dark” as Painted) and plain and uniform tail and rump.

Plumage aside, other features are cited as being helpful for identifying BBBQ. It is supposedly significantly larger than Painted, but specimen measurements taken by Patrick suggest this is not the case. The infrequency of sightings has been attributed to its unusually shy disposition, but there is no reason why the BBBQ should be any more obtuse than its cogeners, and buttonquail generally, while sometimes difficult, are not exceptionally difficult to track down in the field. John and Lloyd insist they will not be sharing images further pending publication of a joint paper on the BBBQ that Lloyd has been working on for several years. For his part, Lloyd is awaiting an indisputable image of a BBBQ before completing the paper. Nor will John and Lloyd disclose the site. They say they do not want a repeat of the way John was treated after his Night Parrot discovery, and that the birds have been there for thousands of years and are therefore not at risk if their whereabouts remain a secret.

I respectfully disagree, and John’s Night Parrot discovery helps to explain why. I have in the past been critical of John’s treatment post-discovery and of the early handling of the Pullen Pullen project. It has become clear over the eight years since John’s finding that the Night Parrot population in the region is critically low, contrary to what many thought would turn out to be the case. With young parrots leaving the nest being highly vulnerable to predation by feral cats (photographed at Pullen Pullen above), and continuing risks from fire and other factors, the future of this population is precarious. Ongoing, highly interventionist management by Pullen Pullen’s owners, Bush Heritage Australia, shaped by University of Queensland research at the site, is essential. In my view, history will judge John’s generous decision to share his find with others at the time – however much he may regret it now – as the right thing to do. That decision has arguably been responsible for salvaging a critically endangered Night Parrot population. And of course, it was the spark that ignited research efforts that led to the discovery of parrot populations in Western Australia.

Recent history is replete with other examples of short, sharp wildlife population declines. Witness how rapidly the population of the Golden-shouldered Parrot (above) – like the BBBQ, another Cape York woodland endemic – has declined in recent times due to changing fire regimes. Other Cape York woodland birds are in decline. The northern-most population of the Eastern Bristlebird, in Queensland’s Conondale Range, was extinct by 1991, within a few years of its discovery. The remarkable Gastric-brooding Frog was similarly extinct within a decade of its discovery. Because something has been there for thousands of years, it does not mean it is going to be there in another 1000 or 100 or even 10 years. Fingers crossed for the Buff-breasted Buttonquail.