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Collared Sunbird | Hedydipna collaris
Halsbandhoningzuiger | Suimanga Acollarado
The Collared Sunbird is one of the smallest sunbirds in the region: a bright green and yellow bird with a short bill that behaves more like a warbler than a nectar-feeder. It often searches for insects among the foliage, in pairs or in mixed bird parties.
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Voice
A soft, falling tsweee and a high tsip as contact calls. The song is a short, fast, thin twitter, tswee-swee-swee-tchirr, often delivered from dense foliage.
Recording: Jonathan Onongo — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
10 to 11 cm, with a short, only slightly decurved bill and a rather short tail. The male has a metallic green head, throat and upperparts, a narrow violet-blue band below the throat and bright yellow breast and belly; small yellow pectoral tufts are usually hidden. The female is just as glossy green above but lacks the metallic throat: the entire underparts are yellow. Juveniles resemble the female, with duller green. In the field the combination of glossy green, plain yellow and small size is what stands out.
Confusion species
Plain-Backed Sunbird (Anthreptes reichenowi) of coastal forest in Mozambique and Zimbabwe has an unglossed olive-grey back; the male has a steel-blue forehead and blue throat. Male Variable Sunbird (Cinnyris venustus) is also yellow below, but has a violet-purple breast band and a longer, more decurved bill; females of that species are olive-brown without gloss. Little Green Sunbird (Anthreptes seimundi) of northern Angola is dull olive-green with no metallic sheen at all.
Habitat
Edges and clearings of evergreen forest, coastal and dune forest, riverine forest and dense thicket in ravines, down to gardens with many indigenous trees. It actively searches for insects and spiders among leaves and creepers, often hanging upside down, and visits flowers less than other sunbirds; at times it pierces the corolla from the side.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
In South Africa from the Garden Route in the Western Cape eastwards through the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal to Eswatini, Mpumalanga and Limpopo; further eastern Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, much of Zambia, the Zambezi Region of Namibia, the Okavango in Botswana and northern and western Angola. Beyond the region over much of sub-Saharan Africa, from Senegal to Ethiopia and Kenya.
- Resident
- Summer visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- Winter visitor (c. Apr–Sep)
- Passage (Mar–Apr, Oct–Nov)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Listen at forest edges for the soft tsweee and then search among the leaves rather than at the flowers. The species readily joins parties of white-eyes, warblers and other small insectivores; follow such a flock and it often turns up by itself. In the coastal forests of KwaZulu-Natal and the eastern Cape it is common all year, gardens included.
Conservation status
Not threatened. The species is widespread and locally common, and adapts well to gardens and secondary forest. It disappears where coastal and riverine forest is cleared entirely.
Scientific name
Hedydipna collaris | (Vieillot, 1819)
Vieillot described the species in 1819 as Cinnyris collaris; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Hedydipna was introduced in 1851 by Cabanis. Hedydipna comes from the Greek hēdudeipnos, 'dainty-supping, sweet-eating', from hēdus, 'sweet', and deipneō, 'to dine' — for the nectar-rich diet of these sunbirds. collaris is Latin for 'collared', for the narrow purple band that separates the male's glossy green throat from its yellow belly. The specimen the first description was based on came from Gamtoos, Eastern Cape, South Africa.