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Cape Sugarbird | Promerops cafer
Kaapse suikervogel | Azucarero del Cabo
The Cape Sugarbird is the brown, streaked nectar-feeder with an extremely long trailing tail that spends almost its whole life on proteas. Males sing from the flower heads and clap their wings audibly in display flight. The species is endemic to the fynbos.
Voice
A dry, grating, rattling jumble of harsh notes, skree-skree-chek-chek, like a pair of shears opening and closing, usually delivered from a protea flower. In display flight the male adds an audible clapping of the wings, frrrt, while his tail flails above him.
Recording: Walter Wallner — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
Total length varies greatly because the male's tail can measure 25 to 34 cm: males are 34 to 44 cm long, females 25 to 29 cm. The upperparts are brown with dark streaking, the throat white and bordered by a brown malar stripe, the breast barred brown, and the undertail coverts bright yellow. The bill is long, thin and decurved. The female has a shorter tail and bill and a paler breast. Flight is loose and bounding, with the tail streaming behind like a ribbon.
Confusion species
Gurney's Sugarbird (Promerops gurneyi) of the Drakensberg and the eastern escarpment has a rufous crown and rufous breast and a distinctly shorter tail; the two species barely overlap. Female Malachite Sunbird is smaller, lacks the long brown tail streamers and the yellow undertail, and is plain olive-grey without streaking.
Habitat
Fynbos with flowering proteas, especially sugarbush (Protea repens) and oleanderleaf protea (Protea neriifolia), on mountain slopes and coastal flats, and also gardens and parks where proteas have been planted. It lives on nectar and on insects picked from the flower heads, and is an important pollinator of proteas.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
Endemic to the fynbos biome of south-western and southern South Africa, from about Nieuwoudtville and the Cederberg southwards to the Cape Peninsula and eastwards along the coastal mountains to the vicinity of Makhanda in the Eastern Cape. It occurs nowhere outside this area.
- Resident
- Summer visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
The best period is May to August, when most proteas are in flower and males sit singing on the flower heads with the tail raised. Listen for the grating rattle, then watch for the wing-clapping display flight above the bushes. Kirstenbosch, the slopes of Table Mountain and Sir Lowry's Pass lie in the heart of the range. In a strong south-easter the birds keep low in the bushes.
Conservation status
Not threatened, with stable numbers across a restricted but well-occupied range. The bottleneck is the protea vegetation itself: fires following too closely on one another leave the bushes no time to mature and flower, and alien pines and hakea crowd the proteas out. Conversion of fynbos to vineyards and cropland also reduces the habitat.
Scientific name
Promerops cafer | (Linnaeus, 1758)
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Merops cafer; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Promerops was introduced in 1760 by Brisson. Promerops comes from the Greek pro, 'resembling', and merops, 'bee-eater' — for a superficial resemblance in bill shape to bee-eaters, although sugarbirds are not related to them. cafer is a dated, eighteenth-century geographic term for the region of the Xhosa-speaking peoples in the eastern Cape Colony, where the first specimen came from; the term was standard in the scientific naming of the period but is now considered offensive and is not used outside this name. The specimen the first description was based on came from Cape of Good Hope.