HabitatHabitat

Habitat

Due to relatively scarce records and unpredictable movements, very little is known about the specific habitat requirements of the Australian Painted Snipe and requires further research. The Australian Painted Snipe generally inhabits shallow terrestrial freshwater (occasionally brackish) wetlands, including temporary and permanent lakes, swamps and claypans. They also use inundated or waterlogged grassland or saltmarsh, dams, rice crops, sewage farms and bore drains. Typical sites include those with rank emergent tussocks of grass, sedges, rushes or reeds, or samphire; often with scattered clumps of lignum (Duma spp.) or canegrass or sometimes tea-tree (Melaleuca). The Australian Painted Snipe sometimes utilises areas that are lined with trees, or that have some scattered fallen or washed-up timber (Marchant and Higgins 1993).

Australian Painted Snipe breeding habitat requirements may be quite specific: shallow wetlands with areas of bare wet mud and mixed heights of low vegetation. Nest records are all, or nearly all, from or near small islands in freshwater wetlands, with a combination of very shallow water, exposed mud, dense low cover and sometimes some tall dense cover (Rogers et al. 2005). Gilgai micro relief, comprising extensive systems of small mounds (e.g. 1 to 3 m in diameter) and hollows (e.g. up to 0.5 m deep), is especially suitable; wetlands with gilgai are abundant in seasonal and other temporary wetlands of Australia, especially in the Murray–Darling, arid and savannah regions on clay soils.

The Australian Painted Snipe has also been recorded nesting in and near swamps, canegrass swamps, flooded areas including grazing land, among cumbungi, sedges, tussock grasses, various couch grasses, and samphires (Tecticornia spp.), also in ground cover of water-buttons and grasses, at the base of tussocks and under low saltbush (Marchant and Higgins 1993). One nest has been found in the centre of a cow-pat in a clump of long grass (Marchant and Higgins 1993) and nests with eggs have been 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.