Painted Buttonquail Mulgoa

Hi All Painted Buttonquail have featured on Mayfair Rd Mulgoa (50 km west of Sydney over the past two weeks. Firstly numerous platelets were noted in wet roadside leaf litter, I thought they might be just Blackbirds or even bandicoots both of which are local. But then a fine fat bright female Painted Buttonquail ran off from the roadside at the 60 speed sign. I has another look at the platelets and they were indeed “platelets”.’ A day later there was repeated “booming” from behind the adjacent bio banked bush. Then today a tiny pingpong ball sized chick ran up the gutter just below the Biobank sign, cheeping for its dad who ran across the road. The cryptically brown/grey/ striped chick eventually managed to get out of the gutter by climbing up a pile of debris and magically disappeared before my eyes, into the short grass and leaf litter. Other recent notables; Variegated Fairywrens and Varied Sitella, plus perhaps fifty plus other spp, many with fledglings, in a wonderful birding year reminiscent of a couple of decades past, when the early morning walk routinely visualised well over fifty bird species . Brown Quail are regular breeders in Mulgoa Valley, and yesterday they were calling as well. Cheers Michael Sent from my iPhone