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Buff-Spotted Flufftail | Sarothrura elegans
Bruinvlekral | Polluela Elegante
The Buff-Spotted Flufftail is the flufftail of the forest floor: a small, seldom-seen bird whose mournful, drawn-out hoot drifts out of forests, dense gardens and ravines on summer nights. It migrates at night and then sometimes turns up in city gardens or even inside buildings.
Voice
The characteristic sound is a long, mournful hoot that swells and then fades, oooooooo, lasting three to four seconds and repeated at intervals, mainly at night and on overcast, wet summer days. It sounds like wind across the neck of a bottle or a distant foghorn and is hard to locate. Also a soft kok-kok between mates.
Recording: Jenny Sharland — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · shortened to the first 60 s, mono · xeno-canto
Identification
15–17 cm long. The male has head, neck and breast chestnut; the rest of the body is black with dense buff to whitish spots, turning to bars on the belly. The tail is rufous barred black. The female is wholly warm brown, finely barred buff and dark, paler below with a pale throat, and also has a barred tail. The bill is dark, the legs greyish. Juveniles are plain dark grey-brown. It walks furtively and crouched over the forest floor and vanishes into the undergrowth at a run when disturbed.
Confusion species
The male White-Spotted Flufftail Sarothrura pulchra has white rather than buff spots and a plain chestnut tail; the two species overlap only in northern Angola and Zambia. Red-Chested Flufftail Sarothrura rufa is finely streaked white with a black tail and lives in marshes. Striped Flufftail Sarothrura affinis has a chestnut tail and a streaked, not spotted, body, and lives in montane grassland.
Habitat
The floor of evergreen forest, dense thickets and forest edges with a thick litter layer, also ravines in grassland, rank grass along forest streams, plantations with undergrowth and large, overgrown gardens. It searches for insects, worms, spiders and small snails among the leaves.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
In South Africa in a narrow band along the south and east coasts and the eastern escarpment, from around Knysna and George through the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal to Mpumalanga and Limpopo, and further in Eswatini, the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, northern Zambia and Angola. Partly migratory: in winter many birds leave the cooler areas. Beyond the region it is scattered across West, Central and East Africa, from Sierra Leone to Ethiopia and Tanzania.
- Resident
- Summer visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
In summer best heard in the forests of KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape, even in leafy suburbs of Durban and Pietermaritzburg, in the hours after dusk and during drizzle. Seeing one takes patience: find an open patch of litter near the calling bird and wait quietly.
Conservation status
Not threatened and locally fairly common in suitable forest, but probably under-recorded owing to its hidden habits. Locally sensitive to the clearance of forest and thicket; migrating birds are killed at night against windows and lit buildings.
Scientific name
Sarothrura elegans | (Smith, 1839)
Smith described the species in 1839 as Gallinula elegans; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Sarothrura was introduced in 1890 by Heine. Sarothrura comes from the Greek sarōtron, 'broom', and oura, 'tail' — for the short, brush-like tail of these small rails. elegans is Latin for 'elegant' — for the finely spotted plumage. The specimen the first description was based on came from near Durban, South Africa.