Rufous Scrubbird | Atrichornis rufescens

Voice

Voice is everything with this species, and it stands in no relation to the size of the bird. The male's song is a series of sharp metallic chip notes accelerating into a deafening rattle; at close range it is painfully loud, and it carries hundreds of metres through dense forest. The bird is also a ventriloquist: the sound appears to come from somewhere quite other than where the singer sits, which can send an observer wandering indefinitely. It is a good mimic besides, weaving the calls of other forest birds into its song. Because the bird itself stays invisible, territories are mapped in management by song alone — here sound is not an aid but the only route.

Identification

Sixteen to eighteen centimetres, much of it tail. The plumage is warm rufous above, finely barred with dark vermiculations, and buff-white to dull brown below. The tail is long and broad and often carried cocked; the wings are short and rounded, and the bird hardly ever flies — it runs through the litter with its tail up. The male carries a black patch on throat and upper breast that the female lacks; females are plainer and smaller. The legs are sturdy and the bill straight and pointed. In practice one gets at best a glimpse of a rufous shape shooting between two ferns.

Confusion species

Real field confusion scarcely arises, for no second bird in the range behaves and sounds like this. A brown bird running off across the forest floor most likely suggests Large-billed Scrubwren (Sericornis magnirostra) and its relatives, which are smaller and finer and readily take wing, or a young lyrebird (Menura alberti and Menura novaehollandiae), which is far bigger and rakes the litter with its feet instead of running through it. The only other member of the family, Noisy Scrubbird (Atrichornis clamosus), lives two thousand kilometres west in south-western Western Australia and nowhere meets this species. Confusion is likelier by ear: those who do not know the accelerating rattle take it for the alarm of a honeyeater.

Habitat

Dense, moist understorey of subtropical rainforest and of Antarctic beech forest, and locally the thick ground layer of wet eucalypt forest adjoining rainforest. The species demands a very particular combination: a deep, permanently damp litter layer holding its food, a dense tangle of ferns, vines and fallen wood between ten and fifty centimetres above the ground to move in, and enough shelter against drying out. That combination exists almost only above roughly six hundred metres, on the moist eastern flanks of the high plateaus. Territories often lie along small streams and on south-facing slopes, where the ground stays wet through a dry summer.

Range and movements

Endemic to a small number of high-lying forest blocks on the Queensland–New South Wales border and in the ranges of the northern New South Wales coast: the Border Ranges and Lamington in the north, and further south Dorrigo, the Gibraltar Range, Washpool, the New England uplands, and the Barrington and Gloucester Tops. Between those blocks lies lower, drier or cleared country that a bird which does not fly will not cross, so that each population sits effectively on an island. The total range is small and the area occupied within it smaller still. There is no movement of any kind.

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

Where and when to look

Work by ear, not by eye. Walk tracks through beech forest or rainforest above six hundred metres in the early morning and stop as soon as the accelerating rattle sounds; then do not try to approach the bird, because the ventriloquial voice reliably sends an observer the wrong way and pushing through the understorey damages precisely the litter layer the species lives on. Stay on the track, wait, and accept that a sighting is a piece of luck rather than an aim. Playing recordings is not appropriate for an endangered species with small, isolated populations.

Conservation

Endangered (EN). Recent taxonomic and red-list compilations place the species in the endangered category, a step up from the lower ranking found in older sources. The population is small, divided among a few dozen forest blocks with no exchange between them, since a bird that does not fly crosses no open ground. The severe bushfires that ran over the high plateaus of the east coast in the summers of 2019 and 2020 burnt the understorey and litter layer in several of those blocks; a species that cannot move recovers from that slowly or not at all. To this are added drying under climate change, disturbance of the litter layer by feral pigs, and invasive weeds such as lantana that change the structure of the understorey. The historical loss of lowland rainforest had already confined the species to the higher country before any of this.

Scientific name

Atrichornis rufescens | (Ramsay, 1866)

Edward Pierson Ramsay described the species in 1866 from birds in the dense brush along the Clarence and Richmond rivers of New South Wales, as Atrichia rufescens. That genus name proved to be in use already for a genus of insects and was therefore replaced by Atrichornis, formed from Ancient Greek a- ('without'), thrix ('hair') and ornis ('bird') — a reference to the absence of the stiff bristles round the base of the bill that most songbirds do have. The epithet rufescens is Latin for 'turning reddish'. The English Rufous Scrubbird and the Spanish matorralero rojizo name colour and scrub; the Dutch rosse doornkruiper places the bird among the treecreepers, which is misleading as to relationship: the family stands not beside the treecreepers but beside the lyrebirds.