Endangered
Mallee Emu-wren
Stipiturus mallee
Mallee Emu-wren is a perching bird in the family Maluridae (order Passeriformes) — Stipiturus mallee, recorded as Endangered and tied to Australia.
Appearance
The adult male mallee emu-wren has olive-brown upperparts with dark streaks, and a pale rufous unstreaked crown, and grey-brown wings. The lores and ear coverts are streaked with black, and there is white streaking under the eye. Even though still long, the tail is not as long as in other emu-wrens, and is composed of six filamentous feathers, the central two of that are longer than the lateral ones.
The mallee emu-wren is an average 16.5 centimetres (6.5 inches) from head to tail.
Range and habitat
The spinifex grass often grows to 1 metre (3 feet 3 inches) in height and provides the optimal habitat for the mallee emu-wren. Although this species is widely dispersed throughout the Murray Sunset Reserve its home ranges are patchy throughout the 488 square kilometres (188 square miles) reserve. Its natural habitat is temperate grassland.
Surveys have been conducted at Billiatt Conservation Park and Ngarkat Conservation Park in South Australia (Clarke 2004. Gates 2003), and at Murray-Sunset National Park, Big Desert Wilderness Park, Big Desert State Forest, Wyperfeld National Park, Wathe Flora and Fauna Reserve and Bronzewing Flora and Fauna Reserve (Clarke 2007), and around Nowingi (Smales et al. 2005), in Victoria.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
Its diet consists mainly of insects among them beetles, seeds, and some vegetation. Breeding is little known, but has been recorded between September and November.
The nest is a dome-shaped structure built of grasses generally located deep within a clump of spinifex.
In crisis
It is threatened because of habitat loss. A national recovery plan (Baker-Gabb in prep.) is being prepared, and a regional recovery plan is already in place (Clarke 2005. SA DEH 2006). Bushfires in the Ngarkat Conservation Park in 2014 rendered the mallee emu-wren "functionally extinct" in South Australia, but initial reintroductions of captive-bred birds from Victoria have shown signs of success.
Mallee Emu-wren is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Mallee Emu-wren, Wikidata item Q1302865. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
