Episode 474: The Button Quail Mystery

DRAMA! Bird drama! Here are some further-reading links if you want to verify that I'm not vilifying anyone:

Buff-breasted Buttonquail: An image claimed to be of this species revealed

Buff-breasted Buttonquail: Smoke & Mirrors

A review of specimens of Buff-breasted Button-quail Turnix olivii suggests serious concern for its conservation outlook

A painted button quail:

Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Back in episode 136 we talked about the button quail, because that episode was about tiny animals and the button quail is really tiny. But let’s revisit the button quail this month, because we have a mystery associated with a particular species of button quail. Button quails generally live in grasslands and are actually more closely related to shore and ocean birds like sandpipers and gulls than to actual quails, but it’s not very closely related to any other living birds. It can fly but it mostly doesn’t. Instead it depends on its coloring to hide it in the grass where it lives. It’s mostly brown with darker and lighter speckled markings, relatively large feet, and a short little tail. It eats seeds and insects along with other small invertebrates. The button quail is especially interesting because the female is more brightly colored than the male, although not by much. In some species the female may have bright white markings, while in others her speckled markings are crisper than the males. The female is the one who calls to attract a male and who defends her territory from other females. The female even has a special bulb in her throat that she can inflate to make a loud booming call. The male incubates the eggs and takes care of the chicks when they hatch. Baby button quails are fuzzy and active like domestic chicken babies but they’re only about the size of a bumblebee. In many species, as soon as the female has laid her eggs, she leaves them and the male and goes on to attract another male for her next clutch of eggs. The various species of button quail live in different areas, including Africa, Asia, and Australia. The species we’re talking about today is the buff-breasted button quail, which is native to one small area of Queensland, Australia. It grows about 9 inches long, or 23 cm, which is big for a button quail, most of which are closer to the size of sparrows, and it’s reddish-brown with darker and lighter speckles. It’s critically endangered due to habitat loss and introduced animals like cats and cattle. There are only an estimated 50 individuals alive today. But that’s only an estimate, because no one has actually for sure seen a buff-breasted button quail since 1922. Also, I’m going to call it the BBBQ from now on because that name is hard to say. The 1922 specimen was shot by a naturalist who was collecting specimens for a museum, which was regrettably common at the time and led to a lot of endangered species being driven to extinction. The bird was already rare in 1922 and that was the last anyone saw of it until 1985, when someone reported seeing one. People flocked to the area in hopes of spotting it, but while there were lots of sightings, no one got a good picture of a BBBQ. All the pictures, and all the recordings of its calls, turned out to be of another species of button quail, a very similar bird called the painted button quail. It’s been 100 years since the bird was last seen, so while we have lots of museum specimens, we don’t have any modern sightings. That means two things. Either the buff-breasted button quail is probably extinct…or it never actually existed in the first place. There are two other species of button quail that live in the same areas where the BBBQ is found, the painted button quail and the brown quail. They’re smaller but otherwise look very similar, especially the painted button quail. Maybe people were mistaking larger individuals of painted button quails as a different species. In 2018, a team of scientists from the University of