6 May 2010

Back in late 2007, on the Atherton Tablelands, a remarkable discovery was made. A Quail-thrush was found a thousand kilometres from the nearest known population.

Male. Photo by Johnathan Munro http://www.wildwatch.com.au

Local bird guide Jonathan Munro first made the difficult journey up a rocky peak near Ravenshoe looking for a strange bird that his friend Brian had seen. What’s even more remarkable is that Brian is a botanist, not a bird-watcher. He doesn’t even use binoculars. But he is described by Jonathan and others as a “remarkable bushman” and “someone who marches to the beat of a different drum”.

Jonathan is pretty unassuming when I call him, just as happy to talk about interesting dragonflies and moths he has been seeing as he is to talk about birds or their discovery.  He is quick to point out that Brian found the bird and makes it into areas most birders would never dream of going.  Jonathan said he is a very well-read and an enthusiastic naturalist, but when he came up with a bird “like a Spotted Quail-thrush”, Jonathan was understandably sceptical.

Brian thought it clearly couldn’t be a quail-thrush, because the book said they don’t occur anywhere near Ravenshoe.  Jonathan took him through many of the possibilities: pipits, thrushes, songlarks etc. Eventually they decided to go up the peak so Jonathan could see this strange bird for himself.

On their way up the hill they tore out the side of a tyre. This  has happened on several occasions, looking for birds in this remote and difficult terrain. When they arrived at the spot, no sooner had Brian said “this is where I saw them”, then two appeared on a rock directly ahead.  Jonathan was speechless.

Female. Photo by Johnathan Munro http://www.wildwatch.com.au. The differences between these birds and Spotted Quail-thrushes from other parts of Australia appear to be, that the birds are larger and have generally brighter plumage colouration; and some males have orange patches in the throat area.

It should be obvious, even to the casual birder, that a discovery the likes of this on mainland Australia has not been made for many years. Here we have a potentially new species. It does indeed appear as though bird is closely related to Spotted Quail-thrush and more likely to be a “subspecies”.

Jonathan took photographs of the bird to a friend of his with links to the ornithology community. Their response was “well, the first step is to collect a specimen”. This usually means, to catch and kill one or several birds and archive them in a museum, even though we don’t yet know how rare this bird might be. In this day and age, we have the technology to describe new species without killing a single bird. This modern approach has been used in several cases overseas.

Jonathan has felt the need to suppress his findings for fear that the birds will be killed before anything is known about their conservation status. He is a lot more forthcoming about the birds themselves. He has seen them mostly singly or in pairs but clustered around areas of suitable habitat, spread over at least a 70 square kilometre area. They appear to favour rocky outcrops on grassy dry sclerophyll slopes in areas.

This is not just about discovering a new bird. This might be the first time anyone has documented the wildlife of this unique place. The new Quail-thrushes share their habitat with an unusually high density of species, like Buff-rumped Thornbill and Painted Button-Quail. Jonathan also tells of possible sightings of the exceptionally rare Buff-breasted Button-quail and a brief encounter with two small wallabies unlike anything he has ever seen before.

Even though the new bird resembles Spotted Quail-thrush and we don’t yet know if it is a new species or subspecies, this is an ornithological discovery, the like of which is practically unknown in modern Australia. Who knows what else might be out there, yet to be discovered.