Bush warblers | Cettiidae

Small, stocky, dull brown birds of dense damp scrub, with rounded wings, a rounded tail and rarely more than a pale supercilium for marking; they keep low in cover and are heard far more often than seen. The song is out of all proportion to the bird: a sudden loud burst of a few seconds, with long silences between. Males are clearly heavier and longer-winged than females and often hold more than one female in a territory whose broods they do not help to raise. In part of the family the tail has ten feathers instead of the usual twelve; the family itself was only delimited this century, after molecular work showed these birds did not belong with the other warblers.