The Australian Painted Snipe (Rostratula australis) is a medium-sized, long-billed, distinctively patterned wader

Wader

Waders, called shorebirds in North America , are members of the order Charadriiformes, excluding the more marine web-footed seabird groups. The latter are the skuas , gulls , terns , skimmers , and auks...

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Taxonomy

The distinctiveness of the Australian Painted-snipe was recognised by John Gould

John Gould

John Gould was an English ornithologist and bird artist. The Gould League in Australia was named after him. His identification of the birds now nicknamed "Darwin's finches" played a role in the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection...

 in 1838 when he described and named it Rostratula australis. However, it was subsequently lumped with the Greater Painted Snipe

Greater Painted Snipe

The Greater Painted Snipe, Rostratula benghalensis, is a species of wader in the family Rostratulidae. It is found in marshes in Africa, India, Pakistan, and South-east Asia -Description:...

 Rostratula benghalensis. More recently it has been shown that the differences between these taxa warrant recognition at the species level. Compared with the Greater Painted Snipe, the Australian Painted-snipe:

• has a longer wing, shorter bill and shorter tarsus
• has a chocolate brown, rather than rufous, head and neck in the female
• has round, rather than flat and visually barred, spots on the tail (female) and upper wing-coverts (male)
• apparently lacks a call

Description

The head, neck and upper breast chocolate brown (in the male, dark grey with a buff median stripe on the crown), fading to rufous in the centre of the hindneck and merging to dark, barred grey on the back. There is a cream comma-shaped mark around the eye. A white stripe on the side of the breast and over the shoulders is diagnostic. The upperwing is grey (with buff spots in the male). The lower breast and underbody are white. Males are generally slightly smaller and less bright than females. Juveniles are similar to adult males. No call has been recorded.

The length ranges from 24 to 30 cm, the wingspan from 50 to 54 cm, the weight from 125 to 130 g.

Distribution and habitat

The Australian Painted Snipe is endemic to Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

, though its distribution is patchy and its presence in any particular area is unpredictable. A previous stronghold was the Riverina

Riverina

The Riverina is an agricultural region of south-western New South Wales , Australia. The Riverina is distinguished from other Australian regions by the combination of flat plains, warm to hot climate and an ample supply of water for irrigation. This combination has allowed the Riverina to develop...

. It frequents shallow, freshwater wetlands with a thick cover of low vegetation, disappearing when conditions become unsuitable.

Conservation

The species has declined drastically during the 20th century and is rare throughout its range. Causes of the decline are ascribed to wetland drainage, river management and salinisation, as well as grazing and trampling of wetlands by stock. Estimates of the total population range from a few hundred to a few thousand. In Australia it is classified as being nationally threatened with a rating of Vulnerable

Vulnerable species

On 30 January 2010, the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species identified 9694 Vulnerable species, subspecies and varieties, stocks and sub-populations.-References:...

. The IUCN recently split the species and treats it as endangered.

Diet

Wetland invertebrate

Invertebrate

An invertebrate is an animal without a backbone. The group includes 97% of all animal species – all animals except those in the chordate subphylum Vertebrata .Invertebrates form a paraphyletic group...

s such as worm

Worm

The term worm refers to an obsolete taxon used by Carolus Linnaeus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck for all non-arthropod invertebrate animals, and stems from the Old English word wyrm. Currently it is used to describe many different distantly-related animals that typically have a long cylindrical...

s, molluscs, insect

Insect

Insects are a class of living creatures within the arthropods that have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body , three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes, and two antennae...

s and crustacean

Crustacean

Crustaceans form a very large group of arthropods, usually treated as a subphylum, which includes such familiar animals as crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, krill and barnacles. The 50,000 described species range in size from Stygotantulus stocki at , to the Japanese spider crab with a leg span...

s; also seeds and other vegetation.

Breeding

Breeding Painted-snipe prefer temporary but recently flooded wetlands, with low cover for shelter, shallow water and exposed mud for feeding, and small islands on which to nest. They nest in ground scrapes or on mounds in water, lined with grass, leaves and twigs, where they lay clutches of 3-4 cream-coloured eggs marked with black streaks. Incubation takes 15-16 days. The young are precocial

Precocial

In biology, the term precocial refers to species in which the young are relatively mature and mobile from the moment of birth or hatching. The opposite developmental strategy is called "altricial," where the young are born or hatched helpless. Extremely precocial species may be called...

 and nidifugous

Nidifugous

Nidifugous organisms are those that leave the nest shortly after hatching or birth. It is derived from Latin nidus for "nest" and fugere meaning "to flee". The terminology is most often used to describe birds and was introduced by Lorenz Oken in 1916...

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