In search of the buff-breasted buttonquail – the one Australian bird that has never been photographed

An illustration of the buff-breasted buttonquail by John Keulemans, published in The Birds of Australia (1911). Photograph: John Gerrard Keulemans

For 100 years, the night parrot was the undisputed mystery bird of Australian ornithology. Until the discovery and subsequent study of a tiny population in Queensland’s far west in 2013, two specimens found by the side of remote outback roads in 1990 and 2006, also in Queensland, were the only hard evidence of its continued existence.

With the parrot now present and accounted for, there remains one Australian bird that has never been photographed: the buff-breasted buttonquail.