Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2023L00199:reg:6:p6
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2023L00199
Segment Type: reg
Provision Reference: reg 6 (pt 6/17)
Character Range: 19865–22854

found with cattle foot-pugs on either side (Jaensch 2003a).

             The nest is usually placed in a scrape in the ground (Pringle 1987), and either has scant lining or is a shallow bowl-shaped nest of dry grass or other plant material (Marchant and Higgins 1993). The Australian Painted Snipe can use modified habitats, such as low-lying woodlands converted to grazing pasture, rice farms, sewage farms, dams, bores and irrigation schemes (Marchant and Higgins 1993), however they do not necessarily breed in such habitats.

             The Australian Painted Snipe loafs on the ground under clumps of lignum, tea-tree and similar dense bushes (Marchant and Higgins 1993). This species has been recorded foraging under clumps of tea-trees (Leach et al. 1987) but most records are from daytime roost sites and the foraging habitat requirements of this species are not well understood and may be quite specific. Further research on the habitat requirements of the Australian Painted Snipe would aid future management of the species.

 Breeding
   The Australian Painted Snipe may breed in response to rainfall patterns and wetland conditions rather than during a particular season. It has been recorded breeding in all months in Australia. In southern Australia most records have been from August to February; this coincides with winter-spring filling and spring-summer drawdown of temporary natural wetlands under the winter rainfall regime. Eggs have been recorded from mid-August to May. Breeding in northern Queensland has been recorded between May and October (Marchant and Higgins 1993), which coincides with summer-autumn filling and winter-spring drawdown of temporary natural wetlands. In the Channel Country and Barkly Tableland, where flooding/inundation is driven by summer-autumn monsoonal and thunderstorm rainfall, active or recently active nests have been found in January, March and May, several weeks or months after a flood peak (Jaensch 2003a, 2003b, 2009).

   This species has mainly been recorded breeding in the Murray–Darling region but has also been recorded in coastal central Queensland (Black et al. 2010), south-east Queensland, eastern NSW, the Channel Country, south-east South Australia and the Mt Lofty Ranges—with a few records from Australia's savannah bioregions. The most northerly breeding records include seven nests from near Derby prior to 1999 and one probable record from Taylor's Lagoon, near Broome, in 1999 (Hassell and Rogers 2002), followed by at least four confirmed breeding records on Roebuck Plains Station in 2017, and one in 2018 (N. Jackett pers. comm.), from Tarrabool Lake in the Barkly Tableland in 1993 (Jaensch 2003), and from Ayr, Queensland in the 1950s (Marchant and Higgins 1993). Though unconfirmed, there was evidence of breeding (a pair with the male consistently giving the distraction display that often indicates juveniles nearby) at an un-named wetland in the Sturt Plateau bioregion, Northern Territory, in June