page_title: Brolga
section_title: Taxonomy
hierarchical_section_title: Brolga / Taxonomy
caption_attribution_description: Australian Brolga Grus rubicunda
context_page_description: The brolga, formerly known as the native companion, is a bird in the crane family. It has also been given the name Australian crane, a term coined in 1865 by well-known ornithologist John Gould in his Birds of Australia.
  The brolga is a common, gregarious wetland bird species of tropical and south-eastern Australia and New Guinea. It is a tall, upright bird with a small head, long beak, slender neck, and long legs. Its plumage is mainly grey, with black wing tips, and it has an orange-red band of colour on its head. The brolga's courting dance is similar to that of other cranes, and is well recognized by Australians. The nest is built of wetland vegetation, either on an elevated piece of land, or floating on shallow water in marshland, and usually two eggs are laid. Incubation takes 32 days and the newly hatched young are precocial. The adult diet is omnivorous and includes plant matter, invertebrates, and small vertebrates.
  Although the bird is not considered endangered over the majority of its range, populations are showing some decline, especially in southern Australia, and local action plans are being undertaken in some areas.
context_section_description: When first described by the naturalist George Perry in 1810, the brolga was misclassified as a species of Ardea, the genus that includes the herons and egrets. It is, in fact, a member of the Gruiformes—the order that includes the crakes, rails, and cranes, and a member of the genus Antigone. Ornithologist John Gould used the name Grus australasianus when he wrote about it and noted it to be widespread in the north and east of Australia. He also recorded that it was easy to tame, and that James Macarthur had kept a pair at his home in Camden. Calling it the Australian crane, he mentioned that its early colonial name had been native companion. The Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union made brolga, a popular name derived from Gamilaraay burralga, the official name for the bird in 1926.
  In 1976, it was suggested that the brolga, sarus crane (Antigone antigone), and white-naped crane (Antigone vipio) formed a natural group on the basis of similarities in their calls. This was further confirmed by molecular studies of their DNA. These also showed that the brolga is more closely related to the white-naped crane than it is to the morphologically more similar sarus crane.
  The brolga was formerly placed in the genus Grus, but a molecular phylogenetic study published in 2010 found that the genus, as then defined, was polyphyletic. In the resulting rearrangement to create monophyletic genera, four species, including the brolga, were placed in the resurrected genus Antigone that had originally been erected by German naturalist Ludwig Reichenbach in 1853
  Two subspecies were suspected to exist: A. r. argentea found in Western Australia, the Northern Territory and western Queensland and A. r. rubicunda, occurring in New Guinea, Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia. However, mitochondrial analyses have shown both populations sharing haplotypes indicating that they are a single taxon, though microsatellite markers show limited gene flow between the two populations.
caption: A 1865 brolga illustration from Birds of Australia by John Gould
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