Endangered
Rufous Scrubbird
Atrichornis rufescens
Rufous Scrubbird is a perching bird in the family Atrichornithidae (order Passeriformes) — Atrichornis rufescens, recorded as Endangered and tied to Australia.
Appearance
Both sexes are brown with a rufous breast and a lightly barred back. The male has a long white streak on both sides on his neck and noticeable white edging on his throat. The female has a lighter breast and lacks the white edging.
Range and habitat
The species occurs only in isolated locations in north-eastern New South Wales and south-eastern Queensland. It requires dense ground cover and deep leaf-litter in rainforest and wet eucalypt forest, at elevations above 600 m, where it forages on snails and insects on the ground. It is endemic to eastern Australia.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Habits
Perching birds hold with three toes forward and one back. A named island starling or leafbird in this catalog is a wild population, not a cage type.
In crisis
By the mid-20th century, it was almost extinct. A subsequent recovery to Near Threatened status in 2004 was followed by successive uplisting to Vulnerable and Endangered status in 2008 and 2012 respectively, in consideration of the fragmented status and small size of remaining habitats. Total population size was estimated at a low of ~2,500 pairs in the 1980s, but is estimated at 1,850 – 2,960 mature individuals as of 2022.
Most of the early decline is believed to have been driven by the clearance of the species' lowland habitats, and logging practices are implicated in current declines, together with natural aging (and consequent disappearance of understorey) of remaining eucalypt stands. Fires in late 2019 burnt 37% of all 1x1 km squares from that birds have been recorded since 1990, mostly in the Main and Gibraltar Ranges with the largest subpopulations on the Lamington Plateau and Border Ranges largely unaffected (G Ehmke unpublished).
Rufous Scrubbird 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 Rufous Scrubbird, Wikidata item Q1188350. 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.
