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Lesser Honeyguide | Indicator minor
Kleine honingspeurder | Indicador Menor
The Lesser Honeyguide is the commonest honeyguide in the region and the only one that regularly turns up in gardens and parks. It does not guide people, but it does visit beehives and wax, and it parasitises mainly barbets.
Voice
From a fixed calling branch the male gives a series of ten to thirty even, clear notes, klew-klew-klew, sometimes pew, repeated at short intervals for hours. Otherwise fairly silent.
Recording: Marc Languy — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
About 15 cm, stocky with a short, stubby bill. Head grey with a small white spot between bill and eye and a narrow black malar stripe. Back and wings olive-green, underparts pale grey, whiter towards the belly. The outer tail feathers are white with dark tips and show when it flies off. Sexes alike; juveniles largely lack the malar stripe.
Confusion species
Pallid Honeyguide (Indicator meliphilus) is smaller, with a greener-tinged head, no malar stripe and paler underparts. Scaly-Throated Honeyguide (Indicator variegatus) is larger, with a spotted throat and breast. Brown-Backed Honeybird (Prodotiscus regulus) has a thin, pointed bill and a brown back. The grey head with white loral spot and black malar stripe is diagnostic.
Habitat
All kinds of wooded country: mixed woodland, riverine forest, forest edge, miombo, plantations, parks and gardens with tall trees; absent from open grassland and desert. It eats wax, bee larvae and insects. A brood parasite of barbets, especially Black-Collared Barbet, and also of woodpeckers and tinkerbirds.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
Across most of the region: Angola, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, northern and eastern Botswana, northern Namibia, Eswatini, Lesotho (locally) and much of South Africa to the Western Cape. Absent from the Namib and the driest Karoo. Beyond the region across almost all of sub-Saharan Africa.
- 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 in the early morning for the repeated klew from a bare branch; the bird often sits still there for a long time and can be studied well. In gardens it visits beehives, candle wax and honey residues, and barbets regularly chase it noisily from their nests.
Conservation status
Not threatened and common. It benefits from tree planting in gardens and towns and from the spread of hosts such as Black-Collared Barbet.
Scientific name
Indicator minor | Stephens, 1815
Stephens described the species in 1815 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. He introduced the genus Indicator in that same work. Indicator is Latin for 'pointer, informer' — for the famous behaviour of the Greater Honeyguide, which leads people to bees' nests. minor is Latin for 'smaller' — smaller than the Greater Honeyguide. The specimen the first description was based on came from Swartkops River near Uitenhage, Eastern Cape, South Africa.