Carpentarian Grasswren | Amytornis dorotheae

Voice

A high, thin, rapidly reeling song of a few seconds, sung from a hummock or a sandstone block, together with a longer, more chattering phrase. The contact call is a fine, sharp tsip; in alarm come dry chek notes. The sound carries reasonably well in this open sandstone country but is pitched so high that it is easily missed. Because the species is thinly spread, a singing bird is often the only sign that a patch is still occupied.

Identification

Sixteen to seventeen centimetres, of which the tail is well over half. The upperparts are warm chestnut brown with broad, sharp white shaft streaks, each edged in black — a clearly striped bird, unlike the vague streaking of the Dusky Grasswren. Throat and upper breast are clean white and sharply defined; the male carries a heavy black moustachial stripe alongside them, the female does not, but has rufous flanks. The bill is fine and dark, the legs long. The tail is held upright when the bird runs.

Confusion species

Kalkadoon Grasswren (Amytornis ballarae) is the species most easily confused with it, because their ranges approach one another in north-western Queensland, around Mount Isa. Ballarae, however, is darker, far more faintly streaked and lacks the contrasting white-and-black throat pattern, and its tail is noticeably shorter. White-throated Grasswren (Amytornis woodwardi) of the Arnhem Land sandstone also has a white throat, but is much larger, far darker — nearly black above — and its range lies some hundreds of kilometres to the west, without overlap. The grasswrens of the striatus group, among them Sandhill Grasswren (Amytornis oweni), resemble this species in throat pattern but live far to the south in spinifex on sand.

Habitat

Old, dense spinifex hummocks (Triodia) on weathered sandstone: plateau edges, gorge walls, boulder fields and stone-strewn slopes. Fire history decides everything: it needs hummocks that have gone many years — in practice well over ten — without burning, large enough to nest and shelter under. The rocky relief supplies shade and crevices. It forages on foot over the bare ground between the hummocks and hardly ever flies more than a few metres.

Range and movements

The sandstone country around the southern Gulf of Carpentaria: from the McArthur River and Borroloola area in the eastern Northern Territory — the source of the type specimen — east to the Mount Isa district and the Musselbrook country of north-western Queensland. The range is not a continuous block but a handful of surviving cores on separate sandstone masses, with much empty ground between them where the species formerly occurred. It is sedentary and moves hardly at all.

• Resident
• Winter
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

Find a sandstone edge or gorge mouth where the spinifex hummocks are large, closed and visibly old, and sit there in the first hour after sunrise rather than walking about. Ground that has burnt in recent years can be skipped — the bird is simply not there. Stand still at the first thin tsip and let the birds come to you; flushing them yields only a running shape. Report your sightings: for this species every occupied patch counts.

Conservation

Vulnerable (VU). The cause is almost entirely the altered fire regime. Where the sandstone country once burnt in small, cool patches, large hot fires now run through it after a good rainfall year and take out whole plateaus at once; old spinifex hummocks need more than ten years to return, and the birds that survive are by then too far apart to recolonise the gaps. Grazing by stock and feral cattle thins the hummocks further, and feral cats hunt freshly burnt ground with particular efficiency. Management therefore turns on small-scale burning early in the dry season, carried out with the traditional owners of this country.

Scientific name

Amytornis dorotheae | (Mathews, 1914)

Gregory Mathews described the bird in 1914 as Magnamytis woodwardi dorotheae, from a specimen taken on the McArthur River at the Gulf of Carpentaria; because the species was later placed in another genus, author and date stand in brackets. The epithet dorotheae honours Dorothy White, daughter of the Australian collector and patron Henry Luke White, who assembled much of the material Mathews worked from. The genus was first called Amytis, after a Persian princess; as that name was preoccupied, Leonhard Stejneger proposed Amytornis in 1885, with Greek ornis (bird). The Dutch name keeps her first name; the English name cites the Gulf of Carpentaria instead.