Dean Portelli wondered about confusion between true quails
and button-quails and plains wanderer? ...."Isn't there
sufficient grounds to argue that the risk of potentially
shooting a nationally threatened species (plains wanderer)
is too great to allow this aimless 'sport' to be allowed."
The confusion could go further. Read this from Horace
Wheelwright's book* about his time as a commercial hunter
around Melbourne in the 1850s.
"We had a little bird on the ranges...came and left with the
painted quail. ...It is a pretty bird, variegated red, brown
and black, with chestnut markings and five or six white
diamond spots on each wing-shoulder. It lay on the ground
three largish, mottled, reddish eggs, in a careless nest.
Although not strictly game, we used to sell them with the
quail."
The Spotted Quail-thrush is now extinct, or nearly so, in
the Adelaide Hills.
Michael Norris
* Bush Wanderings of a Naturalist 1861 reprinted by OUP
1979
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