Following on from last month’s exhortations about walking hard and being rewarded with exciting bird sightings, the apparently elusive Painted Button-quail was seen at the pond at Distillery Creek where Keith McLean captured its image.
Painted Button-quail
While the Painted Button-quail seems rare (or at least hard to see) the Buff-breasted Button-quail, which occurs only in Queensland, is in another league. An article in the Australian BirdLife magazine in March 2022 detailed efforts to find the Buff-breasted Button-quail. As part of this research, the author discovered several features of the Painted Button-quail that could lead to a Painted Button-quail being misidentified as a Buff-breasted Button-quail. The author reviewed 150+ reported sightings of the Buff-breasted Button-quail, and decided that none of the sightings provided irrefutable evidence that it was actually what the finders believed it to be! One unhappy thought is that this misidentification may have led to an overly optimistic conservation status for the Buff-breasted Button-quail.
James Orton