birding-aus

Buff-breasted Button-quail

To: <>
Subject: Buff-breasted Button-quail
From: "Lloyd Nielsen" <>
Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:11:21 +1000
Before everyone gets excited - a few corrections to Keith's note are necessary.

 

It is not the middle of the breeding season for Buff-breasted Button-quail - 
they are a wet season breeder - from about late February to early April, mostly 
March. They are just starting to arrive  into this area - my earliest record 
has been in the last few days of November. If we get heavy rains in the next 
month or so, the grass will become dense and they will vacate the area before 
breeding. At the moment, the grass is VERY sparse, something which the 
Buff-breasted seem to like.

 

I have spent many hours in that area recently, mostly sitting around trying to 
get a large number of calls of Cicadabirds. There is almost nothing breeding 
there at the moment - just a pair of Noisy Friarbirds and Spangled Drongo 
building nests. Painted Button-quail are not calling well indicating that they 
have not started to breed. The dry tropics and the breeding seasons are so very 
different from subtropical and temperate areas, being governed by the wet and 
the dry and there really is no such thing as a general breeding season.

 

I have been following Buff-breasted Button-quail in these areas for nearly 20 
years and as far as I am concerned no damage was done. Had it been in February 
or March, I might have been concerned but then the area is very extensive and 
the density of the birds is always very low.

 

As far as sound and playback are concerned, that certainly is the way to go. 
Painted in that area respond well to playback and I should imagine 
Buff-breasted would do the same. However, as far as I know the call of the 
Buff-breasted has never been recorded. One of our main aims has been to record 
the genuine call of the BB but because of their scarcity and their propensity 
to vacate when the grass grows too dense, we have been unsuccessful. The last 
breeding in those areas as far as I have been able to determine was in the mid 
1990s. 

 

The only minor damage if one could call it that may have been that all the 
attention may have forced the birds to move into a nearby flat bordering 
another gully.

 

When W. McLennan followed the birds and found a number of nests (11) around 
Coen in 1922, he found that there was considerable predation by goannas. There 
are very few goannas here now these days probably because of the introduction 
of the cane toad so it is probably a plus for the BBBQ, not that it seems to 
have helped their numbers.

 

Lloyd Nielsen

Mt Molloy, Nth Qld
===============================

To unsubscribe from this mailing list,
send the message:
unsubscribe
(in the body of the message, with no Subject line)
to: 

http://birding-aus.org
===============================

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>
Admin

The University of NSW School of Computer and Engineering takes no responsibility for the contents of this archive. It is purely a compilation of material sent by many people to the birding-aus mailing list. It has not been checked for accuracy nor its content verified in any way. If you wish to get material removed from the archive or have other queries about the archive e-mail Andrew Taylor at this address: andrewt@cse.unsw.EDU.AU