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Mangrove Sunbird | Anthreptes gabonicus
Bruine honingzuiger | Suimanga Pardo
The Mangrove Sunbird is a sober brown-and-white sunbird of mangroves and near-coastal riverine forest. It has no bright colours, but a striking face pattern with a white supercilium and a white moustachial stripe. Within the region it occurs only on the northern coast of Angola.
Voice
A high, sharp tsip and a thin, squeaky tsee-tsee. The song is a short, high and rather high series of notes, given rapidly from the mangroves.
Recording: Pritam Baruah — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
About 10 cm, with a short, almost straight bill. The upperparts are grey-brown, the tail dark brown with a faint violet gloss and narrow white tips to the outer feathers. A white supercilium and a white moustachial stripe are separated by a dark eye-stripe. The underparts are dull white, sometimes with a greyish wash on the breast. The sexes are almost alike; the male has a slightly more violet-glossed rump. Juveniles are warmer brown with a less distinct face pattern.
Confusion species
The female Western Violet-Backed Sunbird (Anthreptes longuemarei) also has a white supercilium, but is larger, with a violet-glossed tail and yellowish belly, and lives in woodland inland. The female Carmelite Sunbird (Chalcomitra fuliginosa), which shares the coastal zone, is larger, with a long curved bill and mottled underparts. Violet-Tailed Sunbird (Anthreptes aurantius) is yellow or orange-yellow below.
Habitat
Mangroves, near-coastal thickets and riverine forest along the lower reaches of rivers and around lagoons. It forages in the mangrove trees and at flowering shrubs, and gleans many small insects and spiders from foliage.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
Within the region only along the coast of northern Angola, from Cabinda and the mouth of the Congo southward to around the lower Cuanza. Beyond the region along the West African coast from Gambia to Gabon and along the lower Congo River.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Search the mangroves of the Congo mouth or the lagoons south of Luanda at low tide, when birds forage actively in the outer mangrove trees. Look for the white face pattern on an otherwise drab brown-and-white sunbird.
Conservation status
Not threatened. The species is widespread but tied to mangroves, which are locally cut along the Angolan coast and lost to coastal development.
Scientific name
Anthreptes gabonicus | (Hartlaub, 1861)
Hartlaub described the species in 1861 as Nectarinia gabonica; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Anthreptes was introduced in 1832 by Swainson. Anthreptes comes from the Greek anthos, 'flower', and threptēs, 'feeder' — for the habit of taking nectar from flowers. gabonicus means 'from Gabon', the country where the first specimen came from. The specimen the first description was based on came from Gabon.