Plumed Frogmouth – Lost and found

Marbled Frogmouth male, Booloumba Creek

This is the transcript of my article published in current (Autumn 2025) edition of the Australian BirdLife magazine.

The evening of October 28, 1976 was pleasantly balmy. I was camped by a bubbling stream at what was then known quaintly as Beauty Spot 100 in the Conondale Range, in the Sunshine Coast hinterland of south-east Queensland. With me was Glen Ingram, who was conducting an ecological study of the Gastric-brooding Frog, the only vertebrate animal in the world - other than some fish - that raised its young inside its stomach. This unique frog was found only in the Conondale Range and neighbouring Blackall Range. We were not to know that within three years, it would be extinct.

Nor did we know as we set up camp that Beauty Spot 100 - a key site for the frog and indeed a place of great beauty – held other secrets. At 9.50pm that October night, Glen was downstream from camp looking for frogs when I heard a peculiar call from inside rainforest across the creek. I describe it in my notes as a series of gobbling “caw” notes uttered quickly in succession, of moderately deep tone and descending in volume. I had heard nothing like it previously.

Beauty Spot 100

I thought this might be the scarcely known Plumed Frogmouth - the southern subspecies of the Marbled Frogmouth - although nobody knew what it sounded like then, and there were very few records, historically or in recent times. A month earlier, in the Nightcap Range in north-east NSW, I flushed a bird from a piccabeen palm which was possibly a Plumed Frogmouth.

My notes record that I crossed the creek and quickly located the Beauty Spot 100 bird. It was perched three metres from the ground on a vine hanging from a strangler fig. I watched it call; this was without doubt a Plumed Frogmouth. I noted rows of white spotting on the wings, the rufous-grey colouration, long bristle plumes on the forehead, and orange eyes.

Marbled Frogmouth pair at day roost, Blackall Range

I summonsed Glen with a loud “cooee” but we could not immediately relocate the bird, although it called frequently over the next two nights. Then, at 12.45am on October 30, a frogmouth called very close to camp. We found it perched five metres away on a creekside stump. Other features noted included blotching on the underparts “giving an irregular, patchy” appearance. A different call, a double-note “koor-loo”, was heard.

The notes describe these encounters as “a most exciting time”. Indeed. This was the first time the Plumed Frogmouth had been heard; the first sighting of adult birds in the wild; and the first field observations of its behaviour. John Gould had two specimens of uncertain provenance when he described a new species, Podargus plumiferus, in 1845. (While subsequently regarded as a subspecies, taxonomists consider it a likely candidate for future resplitting.)

Otherwise, as my colleague Chris Corben reported subsequently, there were no corroborated records – or sites confirmed for reported birds - prior to 1969, when the naturalist David Fleay was given a nestling retrieved from a creek on Mt Tamborine, south-east Queensland. In 1972, the remains of a Plumed Frogmouth were found north of Lismore, NSW.

Conondale Range National Park

After the Beauty Spot 100 birds were discovered, it was a long time before anybody else spotted a Plumed Frogmouth, although I saw one at what is now the Booloumba Creek camping ground in the Conondale Range in September 1977. (Like Beauty Spot 100, that site continues to be occupied by frogmouths to this day.) In the 1970s, call playback was essentially unheard of as a birding tool in the field.

The Plumed Frogmouth is shy and secretive - unlike its much more common cousin, the Tawny Frogmouth, which shares its habitat. The bird rarely ventures into the open and is reluctant to leave the dense rainforest thickets it frequents, often perching high in the canopy and frustratingly out of view.

By the early-1980s, playback had become a game changer, as it was discovered that birds were responsive to taped calls. Chris expanded knowledge of the bird while employed by the Queensland Forest Service to survey wildlife in the Conondale Range. He found frogmouths at many new sites and provided tapes for a survey undertaken by the Queensland Ornithological Society. In November 1983, teams of volunteers scattered along the east Australian seaboard from Cooktown in the north to Sydney in the south gathered at dusk in suitable-looking habitat to play tapes. At the time, it was arguably Australia’s biggest single Citizens Science undertaking for natural history research.

Female Marbled Frogmouth, Imbil State Forest

Birds were found to occur across a wide area extending from the Many Peak Range near Miriam Vale in Queensland in the north, south to Lismore in NSW. By 1992, they had been recorded from 250 sites at 18 widely separated localities up to 104km inland and up to 800 metres above sea level. The frogmouth was not detected in north Queensland’s wet tropics – the nominate subspecies of Marbled Frogmouth occurs in Australia only in northern Cape York – nor in other well-known rainforest sites such as Eungella in central coastal Queensland and the Bunya Mountains.

Birds occurred in notophyll vine scrub, or subtropical lowland rainforest. This habitat was once widespread in south-east Queensland and north-east NSW but has been largely cleared. The most substantial of remnant areas surviving are in the Conondale Range, which accommodates well over 100 Plumed Frogmouth sites today. I live in the foothills of the nearby Blackall Range, where eight pairs reside within 10km of my home.

A big mystery is why the Plumed Frogmouth went unnoticed for so long when its extraordinary and evocative call is so distinctive. One factor is the expansion of community interest in natural history combined with the advent of playback and other field aids. Still, I and others had camped frequently at Beauty Spot 100 and other sites prior to October 1976 and heard nothing of interest. It is possible the bird had undergone a population crash due to disease or some other factor, and was at the start of a comeback when that “exciting time” fortuitously came to be.

Marbled Frogmouth immature female, Conondale National Park

Interestingly, the frogmouth in recent years has been found at high elevations in the McPherson Range on the NSW-Queensland border in temperate rainforest. This includes the vicinity of O’Reillys Guesthouse, an area visited by numerous birders over many years. It might be expected they should have been found there long ago; it could be that climate change or other factors account for relatively recent distributional change.

At the time of the 1976 discovery, with friends including Glen Ingram and Chris Corben, I was heavily involved in a campaign by the Wildlife Research Group (Queensland), Save the Conondale Range Committee and others to stop logging and the bulldozing of forest for plantations in the Conondales. The Plumed Frogmouth featured prominently in the campaign, the chief objective of which was to protect the area in a proposed 31,000ha national park.

Tawny Frogmouth cohabits with Marbled Frogmouth

A silver lining to this story is that we prevailed. Logging and rainforest clearing were stopped. The Sunshine Coast hinterland today is graced by the 36,000ha Conondale National Park. Campsites where once we encountered no others – even during busy holiday times – now attract thousands of visitors.

Outside the park, the Plumed Frogmouth survives in small vine scrub remnants that intersperse extensive hoop pine plantations in the Sunshine Coast hinterland; sometimes birds reside deep inside monocultural plantations. I have campaigned in recent years for parts of Imbil State Forest and other plantations to be considered for “rewilding”, allowing the recovery of greater areas of vine scrub.

Hoop pine plantation & continguous subtropical rainforest - Imbil State forest

Hoop pine is a native rainforest tree. If plantations are left unlogged, they are eventually colonised by other rainforest flora. Wildlife such as the endangered Black-breasted Buttonquail, also restricted to subtropical vine scrub, is quick to utilise restored plantation. Lowland rainforest is also the habitat of the Coxen’s Fig-Parrot, which many fear may be extinct, and many other range-restricted plants and animals. BirdLife Australia is among organisations that back the rewilding push.

Black-breasted Buttonquail

The timber company holding Queensland state forest logging permits, HQPlantations, has rejected submissions to conduct a small rewilding trial in a plantation adjoining Conondale National Park. Subtropical lowland rainforest is a critically endangered habitat. A key battle is over but the war is not yet won.

Rainforest at Beauty Spot 100