African Paradise-flycatcher (Terpsiphone virisidis)

 African Paradise-flycatcher (Terpsiphone virisidis)

Photo@Yan Van Dainne

African Paradise-Flycatcher is a beautiful bird with very long tail which allows sometimes detecting the bird among the foliage.
Plumage is very variable, from rufous to white, with five colours recognized.

Adult male (of all types) has rufous upperparts, upperwing and tail, with variable amount of black and white and greyish underparts.
Head is glossy blue-black with a crest. Central tail feathers are very elongated. In breeding plumage, the upper mandible and the eye-rings become electric-blue.

The male of nominate race has deep rufous upperparts. Wings show conspicuous white edgings.
Underparts are glossy blue-black on throat and breast. Belly is duller, mostly dark grey. Undertail coverts and tail are rufous.
Head is glossy blue-black with dark, thick crest on the crown.
Bill is cobalt-blue with black tip. Eyes are dark brown with thick bright cobalt-blue eye-ring. Legs and feet are bluish-black.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.