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Rosy-Throated Longclaw | Macronyx ameliae
Roodkeellangklauw | Bisbita Gorjirrosa
The Rosy-Throated Longclaw is the slimmest longclaw of the region: a heavily streaked ground bird with a salmon-pink throat and breast framed by a black necklace. It lives locally in wet grasslands and floodplains in the north and east of the region.
Voice
A plaintive whistled tchoo-eet or see-oo, often repeated from a grass tuft or small bush. In song flight a series of clear, rapid whistles, tchip-tchip-tchip-tchew. The alarm is a hoarse, mewing meew.
Recording: isaac kilusu — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
A slim longclaw of 19 to 20 cm, lighter in build than the yellow species. The upperparts are buff with very heavy black streaks, making the back look almost blotched. The male has a salmon-pink to rosy-red throat and breast, bordered by a broad black necklace, and a pink-tinged buff belly with streaked flanks. The female is duller, with a paler pink throat and a narrow or broken necklace. Outside the breeding season both sexes are less vivid. Juveniles are buff with hardly any pink and a spotted breast. The outer tail feathers are white.
Confusion species
Grimwood's Longclaw (Macronyx grimwoodi) of north-western Zambia and eastern Angola also has a pink throat, but is larger and heavier, with buff rather than pink breast and belly and a narrower necklace; it lives on drier grassland plateaus. Red-Throated Pipit (Anthus cervinus), a rare winter visitor, also has a pink throat but is much smaller, lacks a necklace and has a heavily streaked breast.
Habitat
Wet and seasonally flooded grassland, floodplains and the edges of marshes and vleis with short to medium grass, mostly in lowlands but in the north up to over 1500 m. It forages on foot for insects and moves with the rise and fall of the water.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
Local and patchy in the region: in Zambia mainly on the large floodplains and marshes of the north and centre, including around the Bangweulu Swamps, further in northern Malawi and in the lowlands of the Zambezi Delta in Mozambique. Beyond the region in southern DR Congo, Tanzania and Kenya.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
The Zambezi Delta near Marromeu and the marsh grasslands around Bangweulu are the best places. Walk slowly along the edge of wet grassland and watch for a heavily streaked bird that flushes and drops again; the pink throat shows only when it sits upright on a tuft. In the rainy season the males sing freely.
Conservation status
Not threatened, but locally scarce and dependent on wet grassland. Drainage, conversion of floodplains to rice fields and cropland, and changes in water regimes caused by dams are the main threats.
Scientific name
Macronyx ameliae | de Tarragon, 1849
De Tarragon described the species in 1849 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. The genus Macronyx was introduced in 1827 by Swainson. Macronyx comes from the Greek makros, 'long', and onux, 'claw' — for the very long hind claw of these birds. ameliae honours an Amélie: the describer, the Marquis Léonce de Tarragon, named it after either his wife or his mother, both of whom bore that name. The specimen the first description was based on came from Durban, South Africa.