Today's Featured Article

The black-breasted buttonquail (Turnix melanogaster) is a buttonquail endemic to eastern Australia. It is a plump quail-shaped bird with white eyes and predominantly marbled black, rufous and pale brown plumage, marked prominently with white spots and stripes. Like other buttonquails, it is unrelated to the true quails, and the female is larger and more boldly coloured than the male, with a distinctive black head and neck sprinkled with fine white markings. The usual sex roles are reversed, as the female mates with multiple male partners and leaves them to incubate the eggs. It is usually found in rainforest and forages in large areas of thick leaf litter. Most of its original habitat has been cleared, and the remaining populations are fragmented. The black-breasted buttonquail is listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List and under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. A three-year conservation project has been under way since 2021. (Full article...)