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Mountain Pipit | Anthus hoeschi
Bergpieper | Bisbita Montano
The Mountain Pipit is the pipit of the bare high plateaus of Lesotho and the Drakensberg, where it breeds only in summer. It closely resembles African Pipit, but is larger and darker, with buff rather than white outer tail feathers. Where it winters is still only partly known.
Voice
The song is a repeated chree-chree-chree or trree-trree-trree, given by the male in a high, undulating song flight; it is slower, lower and fuller in tone than that of African Pipit. The call on take-off is a hoarse chissik.
Recording: Maarten Sluijter — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
A robust pipit of 17 to 18 cm, heavier and longer-tailed than African Pipit. The upperparts are dark brown with broad dark feather centres, so the back looks heavily mottled. The underparts are warm buff with bold dark streaking across the whole breast. A clear pale supercilium and a dark malar stripe. The bill is fairly long with a pink base to the lower mandible (yellowish in African Pipit). The best feature is the outer tail feathers: buff to pale ochre, not white, which shows well on take-off. The sexes are alike.
Confusion species
African Pipit (Anthus cinnamomeus) breeds lower but overlaps at the lower edge of the high mountains; it is smaller and paler, with finer breast streaks, white outer tail feathers and a yellowish bill base, and sings faster. Long-Billed Pipit (Anthus similis) of rocky slopes is plainer above, more weakly streaked on the breast and also has buff tail edges, but has a longer bill and a different song. African Rock Pipit (Anthus crenatus) is unstreaked greyish-brown with an olive-yellow wing panel.
Habitat
Short montane grassland on high plateaus, gentle slopes and ridges above about 2000 m, often with scattered stones and rock sheets. It forages on foot for insects and nests under a grass tuft. Outside the breeding season the species moves away and cannot be found in the high mountains.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
In the breeding season confined to the highlands of Lesotho and the adjacent high Drakensberg in KwaZulu-Natal, the eastern Free State and the north-eastern Eastern Cape. The wintering grounds are poorly known; the few records point to Angola and southern DR Congo, and possibly Zambia. A buff-tailed pipit turning up there in the dry season deserves attention.
- Summer visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Drive over Sani Pass onto the Lesotho plateau between December and February, or walk the high grasslands of the Drakensberg, and listen for the slow, heavy song in the air. A bird on the ground can be checked through a telescope for bold breast streaking, pink bill base and, on take-off, the buff tail edges.
Conservation status
Near Threatened. The breeding range is small and confined to the high mountains, where overgrazing, erosion and climate change degrade the montane grassland. Little is known about numbers or conditions on the wintering grounds.
Scientific name
Anthus hoeschi | Stresemann, 1938
Stresemann described the species in 1938 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. The genus Anthus was introduced in 1805 by Bechstein. Anthus is the Latin word for a small bird of grasslands mentioned by Pliny the Elder. hoeschi honours the German farmer and ornithologist Walter Hoesch (1896–1961), who studied birds in Namibia. The specimen the first description was based on came from Erongo Mountains, Namibia.