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Pilbara Grasswren | Amytornis whitei
Pilbaragrassluiper | Maluro de Pilbara
The Pilbara Grasswren is the grasswren of the red rock country of the Pilbara in north-western Western Australia: a long-tailed, rufous-brown bird that lives among spinifex hummocks on steep scree slopes and gorge walls. It was long treated as the western subspecies of the Striated Grasswren and has only recently been recognised as a species in its own right.
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Voice
A high, thin, fast reeling song of a few seconds which carries well across open rocky slopes but is easily missed because of its pitch; older ears often no longer pick it up. The contact call is a fine, sharp tsip. When disturbed the birds give dry, short chek notes as they run off between the stones.
No freely licensed recording has been found for this species yet; what to listen for is described below.
Identification
Fourteen to sixteen centimetres, well over half of it tail; the tail is cocked when running and carried flat behind the body when the bird is in cover. The upperparts are rufous-brown with fine white streaks, each edged black. The throat is white and sharply bordered; the male has a black malar stripe, the female does not, but has rufous flanks. The bill is fine and dark and the legs long. In the harsh Pilbara light the bird often looks paler and sandier than it does in the hand.
Confusion species
Within the striatus group range is the only workable distinction: the Sandhill Grasswren (Amytornis oweni), likewise a recent split, lives in spinifex on the dunes and sandplains of the interior rather than on rocky slopes, and the Striated Grasswren (Amytornis striatus) occurs more than a thousand kilometres to the east. The Dusky Grasswren (Amytornis purnelli) of the MacDonnell Ranges occupies comparable rocky spinifex country but is darker and far less strongly streaked and lacks the crisp black-and-white throat pattern. The Western Grasswren (Amytornis textilis) occurs in the same corner of Western Australia but is larger and longer-tailed, much plainer and duller, and lives in acacia and saltbush shrubland rather than in spinifex on rock.
Habitat
Old, dense hummocks of spinifex (Triodia) on scree slopes, breakaways and gorge walls in the Hamersley Range, the Chichester Range and the rocky ridges around them. It needs hummocks that have gone unburnt for a decade or more; it disappears from a slope shortly after fire and returns only once the hummocks are large and closed again. Flat spinifex country without rock is avoided.
Where the bird is most often found, arranged by main group and formation.
Range and movements
Endemic to the Pilbara of north-western Western Australia, from the country around the Coongan River — the source of the type specimen — through the Chichester Range to the Hamersley Range and the Karijini gorges. Resident on fixed territories; the population is fragmented across separate rock massifs and the birds scarcely cross the plains between them.
- Resident
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
Search the lower half of a scree slope where the spinifex hummocks stand knee-high and closed, preferably in the first hour after sunrise. Stand still at the first thin tsip and let the birds work towards you; flushing them almost always yields nothing but a running shape. Gorge mouths and the upper rim of breakaways are the best places.
Conservation
The IUCN has not yet assessed this species under its own name; on the Red List it still falls within the broadly circumscribed Striated Grasswren (Amytornis striatus), which is listed as of Least Concern. The Pilbara population is larger and better spread than that of the Opalton Grasswren, but is under the same pressures: fire too frequent to leave old spinifex hummocks standing, feral cats, and locally mining that removes whole rocky ridges. The species is well represented in Karijini National Park.
Scientific name
Amytornis whitei | Mathews, 1910
Gregory Mathews described the bird in 1910 from a specimen taken on the Coongan River in mid-western Australia. The epithet whitei honours a member of the Australian ornithological family White; most of the birds Mathews named this way around 1910 were dedicated to the collector and patron Henry Luke White (1860–1927), but that attribution has not been verified for this species. The genus was first called Amytis, after a Persian noblewoman; because that name was already taken, Leonhard Stejneger proposed Amytornis in 1885, adding the Greek ornis (bird). The English name refers to the Pilbara, the iron-ore region the species inhabits.