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Both males and females have a grey face , a brown and black striped or mottlled back and black and white barred wings. Males have a white chest and females have a rufous chest. Both have a rufous rump and dark tail. The short tail has distinctive spines on the end - the bare shafts of the strong tail feathers.
Australian Logrunners feed on invertebrates and can be found foraging through the deep leaf litter of wet forests of eastern Australia. They have strong, large feet for scratching aside the leaf litter and they use their stiff tails as a prop. They usually forage by themselves or in pairs, but can sometimes be found in small groups. As their common name suggests, these birds feed around fallen logs and sometimes use logs as calling posts.
Breeding season is in the Winter, from June to September. The nest is a dome-shaped mound of leaves, sticks, moss and pieces of tree fern, covered by a layer of leaf litter. It is usually built on the ground, but it sometimes is built above ground in dense vegetation. The female builds the nest and incubates the eggs by herself. She lays one to three eggs and the eggs take about 25 days to hatch. Once hatched, her mate will bring food to the nest.
Australian Logrunners are found in coastal regions of southern Queensland, down into southern New South Wales. There have only been two sightings of an Australian Logrunner in Girraween.
Tom Ryan
Overseer of Girraween National Park, 1966-1972
My knowledge of rarer Girraween birds wasn't great and I often relied on "experts". In my time at Girraween, I encountered one positive sighting of a bird identified by experts as a Logrunner. A possible second sighting in another area was identified by Percy Grant as that species.
In those days, a vehicle track shortened the walk to Mt Norman by about 500 meters. The track branched from the Wallangarra-Palen Yard road, where today's parking area and toilets are located. From the end of that track, there was a rough foot trail leading to Mt Norman. Just before the rock slopes were reached, a boulder strewn gully was crossed. Densely vegetated with shrubs such as Bursaria, Leptospermum and Trigger Plants, with a few Boronias and Persoonias along the northern verge, the only large trees in the bed of the gully were two old gnarled and fire-damaged Brush Box. Along the course of the gully there was a series of small mulch "shelves" which were covered with dense moss, lichen and a miniature grass or sedge and most of the shelves were sheltered by fallen twigs and branches. Percy Grant requested that I take him and a professional wildlife photographer to the gully to look for possible orchids to photograph. I had found a fresh, but empty Lyre Bird nest amongst the boulders at the head of the gully. Whilst walking up the gully, we came on a busy little bird hopping around amongst the ground litter near one of the Box trees. It didn't seem too concerned about our intrusion into its territory and from about three yards, each of us were able to take several photos.
[Note: the bird that was photographed has since been confirmed as a female Orthonyx temminckii Australian Logrunner.]
Some time after the Mt Norman observation, Percy and I were looking for terrestrial orchids in a patch of dense vegetation on the Old Wallangarra Road. Percy stopped dead in his tracks when we heard the curious repetitive, soft call of a bird amongst the ground litter only about six feet ahead. Again, it was a long time ago, but my best description of that call was a repetitive "tweep". Percy's excitement grew when we spotted the bird as it was scratching around through the ground litter. It appeared to be identical to the bird seen at Mt Norman and Percy, who had recorded a similar example near Mt Warning, confidentially identified it as a Logrunner. This bird, however, was considerably more wary than the Mt Norman bird and we were only to observe it for probably less than half a minute and we didn't get any photos of it before it disappeared.
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