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Brown Parisoma | Curruca lugens
Bruine meeszanger | Curruca Parda
The Brown Parisoma is a dark, grey-brown Curruca warbler of the East African highlands which reaches the extreme north of the region with a small, isolated population in Malawi and adjacent Zambia. It lives in tree canopies, where it behaves more like a small flycatcher than a warbler.
Voice
A loud, varied, musical song of clear whistles and short trills, often in repeated phrases such as chip-chip-chirree-wee-oo. The call is a dry, rasping chrrr and a soft chip.
Recording: Abdulrahman Adam — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
13–14 cm, almost wholly dark grey-brown, slightly paler and greyer on the belly and flanks. The throat is off-white with fine dark spots or scales. The undertail coverts are pale buff with pale fringes. The fairly long tail is blackish brown with white outer webs to the outer feathers and narrow white tips, most obvious when the bird fans it. The bill is short, thin and black, the legs dark. The sexes are alike. It moves restlessly through the canopy, sallying for insects in short flights while constantly fanning and swinging its tail.
Confusion species
Grey Tit-Flycatcher Fraseria plumbea is blue-grey rather than brown, has a white supercilium and also a white-edged tail that it fans; it lives in lower-lying woodland. Pale Flycatcher Agricola pallidus is paler, perches upright on lookouts and shows no white in the tail. African Hill Babbler Sylvia abyssinica from the same highlands has a grey head and olive-brown back and keeps low in dense forest edge. Chestnut-Vented Warbler Curruca subcoerulea of the south and west of the region is grey, with a streaked throat and a chestnut vent.
Habitat
Open montane woodland, forest edges and wooded savanna on plateaus, often with acacias and other open-crowned broadleaved trees. It forages mainly in the middle and upper levels of the canopy for small insects, alone or in pairs, and joins mixed foraging flocks.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
Within the region only in the northern highlands of Malawi, with a small number of records from adjacent north-eastern Zambia; here rare and little known. Beyond the region it is distributed across the highlands of Eritrea and Ethiopia through South Sudan, Uganda, eastern DR Congo and Kenya to Tanzania.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
All year but difficult; search open woodland with acacias and broadleaved trees on the plateaus of northern Malawi and listen for the clear, varied song from the canopy. The bird is best recognised by its behaviour: a dark little bird fluttering through the canopy with a fanned, white-edged tail.
Conservation status
Not threatened. Locally fairly common over its large East African range, but small in number and isolated in the region; clearance of highland woodland and conversion to farmland are a threat here.
Scientific name
Curruca lugens | (Rüppell, 1840)
Rüppell described the species in 1840 as Sylvia (Curruca) lugens; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Curruca was introduced in 1802 by Bechstein. Curruca is Latin, the name of an unidentified small bird mentioned by the Roman poet Juvenal. lugens is Latin for 'mourning' — for the sombre dark grey-brown plumage. The specimen the first description was based on came from Simien, Ethiopia.