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Chirping Cisticola | Cisticola pipiens
Moerasgraszanger | Cistícola Gorjeador
The Chirping Cisticola is a fairly large, long-tailed cisticola of dense reed and sedge swamps in the centre of southern Africa. It often shares its habitat with Luapula Cisticola, but usually chooses taller, denser vegetation and draws attention with its chirping song ending in a trill.
Voice
The song starts with a few chirping notes and ends in a rising trill, chip-chip-chip-chirrrrrrr, from a reed plume or in a short flight over the swamp. It calls a sharp chwit and in alarm a high, scolding cher-cher.
Recording: Magnus Wadstein — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
13–15 cm, with a long, broad, graduated tail. The crown is warm rufous-brown with fine streaks, the back olive-brown with faint, poorly contrasting dark streaks. The flight feathers are dully edged rufous-brown. The face shows an indistinct pale supercilium, and the underparts are buffy white, warmer on the flanks and undertail coverts. The tail is brown with a dark band before the pale buff tips. In non-breeding plumage the crown is more heavily streaked and the tail even longer. The sexes are alike, the male larger.
Confusion species
Luapula Cisticola Cisticola luapula is smaller and shorter-tailed, has in breeding plumage a grey back with sharp black streaks, white underparts and a brighter rusty wing panel, and sings buzzing notes. Levaillant's Cisticola Cisticola tinniens is smaller, with a black back and a bright rufous tail. Little Rush Warbler Bradypterus baboecala is darker, has a broad, rounded tail without pale tips, creeps low through the reeds and gives an accelerating rattling sound. Lesser Swamp Warbler Acrocephalus gracilirostris has an unstreaked brown back and a long bill. The combination of size, long broad tail, poorly contrasting back and chirping song points to Chirping Cisticola.
Habitat
Dense, fairly tall vegetation in permanent and seasonal swamps: reedbeds, papyrus fringes, tall sedge and rank grass along rivers, lagoons and the edges of floodplains. It usually keeps low and hidden in the vegetation, but climbs to the tops to sing.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
Within the region in central and eastern Angola, across much of Zambia (including the Kafue Flats, Bangweulu and the western floodplains), in northern Botswana (Okavango Delta and Linyanti), in the Zambezi Region of Namibia, in north-western Zimbabwe along the Zambezi and in northern Malawi. Beyond the region in south-eastern DR Congo, western Tanzania and Burundi.
- Resident
- Summer visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- Passage (Mar–Apr, Oct–Nov)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Present all year; most often recorded in the Okavango Panhandle around Shakawe and along the Linyanti and Chobe, or on the Kafue Flats. Search reed and papyrus fringes for a large, long-tailed cisticola on a plume, and listen for the rising trill at the end of the song.
Conservation status
Not threatened. Fairly common in suitable swamps. It depends on intact reed and papyrus vegetation; drainage, dams and excessive burning can locally remove habitat.
Scientific name
Cisticola pipiens | Lynes, 1930
Lynes described the species in 1930 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. The genus Cisticola was introduced in 1829 by Kaup. Cisticola combines the Ancient Greek kisthos 'rock-rose' with the Latin colere 'to dwell'. pipiens is Latin for 'piping, chirping', for the thin call. The specimen the first description was based on came from Huambo, Angola.