Tag: Birding in Meru Nartional Park

Bird of the Week

Yellow-throated Sandgrouse (Pterocles gutturalis)

Yellow-throated Sandgrouse (Pterocles gutturalis)

Photo@Raymond Galea

Yellow-throated Sandgrouse is a sexual diamorphic species The female and male both have a buff-yellow chin and throat. The male is olive-brown and unspotted with a black collar on its foreneck. Upper wing-coverts are tipped with a light cinnamon and flight feathers are blackish brown. highs and belly are a dark chestnut. Females are mottled with fine black bars on their chestnut belly.These monogamous birds are also solitary nesters. They lay two to three eggs during the winter. The female incubates the eggs during the day and the male incubates them at night, for a total of 26 days. The female and male both care for the chicks when they hatch.They are seed and grains eaters.The bird appearing above was photographed inside Ngorongoro Crater.The yellow-throated sandgrouse is the largest of the five Kenyan Sandgrouses.In Kenya it is best seen in areas found in Southern part of the Country around Amboseli, Masai Mara and Tsavo west national park.

Bird of the Week

Hildebrandt’s Starling (Lamprotornis hildebrandti)

Hildebrandt's Starling (Lamprotornis hildebrandti)

Photo@Michael Sammut

Hilderbrandt’s Starling is a red-eyed, and generally darker-toned than Superb Starling without a white breast band or vent. This species is confined to open woodland and open thorn bushes found in Arid and Semi-arid areas of the Great Rift Valley and the lower eastern Kenya.

Uncategorized

white-headed Mousebird (Colius leucocephalus)

Photo@Jacqui Harrington

Mousebirds, sometimes called colies, are an ancient group of small arboreal birds in Africa. They are so unique in morphological peculiarities that they were proposed as a separate Order of birds as long ago as 1872, and this placement has been confirmed by molecular evidence (Sibley & Ahlquist 1990, Hackett et al. 2008). They are the only Order restricted to sub-Saharan Africa.

In Kenya three species occurs,  White-headed, Blue-naped and Speckled Mousebird.There are only two genera among the mousebirds, and four of the six species are placed in Colius, including White-headed Mouse Bird  of east Africa (left). White-headed Mousebird, like most of this genus, is a bird of arid thornscrub. Its range is limited to a band of such thornscrub from s. Somalia to n.e. Tanzania. The most widespread species, Speckled Mousebird C. striatus, occurs more broadly in a variety of woodlands.

The three  species of Colius mousebirds are essentially allopatric in distribution, without any significant overlap, and where there is a little range overlap, they separate out by habitat.In Kenya it is found  in Samburu, Meru, Tsavo west and Tsavo East National Park.