All species › Cranes, rails and allies › Flufftails › White-Spotted Flufftail
White-Spotted Flufftail | Sarothrura pulchra
Parelvlekral | Polluela Pulcra
The White-Spotted Flufftail is a small, brightly coloured flufftail of rainforest streams, and the only flufftail in the region in which the female also has a chestnut head. Within southern Africa it reaches only the far north of Angola and Zambia.
Voice
A fast series of clear, hollow, somewhat bell-like notes, goo-goo-goo-goo-goo, and a sharp repeated kwik-kwik; pairs call in duet. It also calls by day, especially early in the morning and after rain, and is then heard far more often than seen.
Recording: András Schmidt — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · shortened to the first 60 s, mono · xeno-canto
Identification
16–18 cm long. The male has head, neck, breast and tail bright chestnut; back, wings and belly are black with round white spots. The female has the same chestnut head, neck and tail, but the body is finely barred black and rufous-buff. The bill is dark, the legs grey. Juveniles are dark olive-brown with a paler throat. Like all flufftails it is short and compact, with a short fluffy tail; it runs fast and crouched and rarely flies.
Confusion species
The male Buff-Spotted Flufftail Sarothrura elegans has buff rather than white spots and a black-barred tail; its female is brown, without a chestnut head. Red-Chested Flufftail Sarothrura rufa is finely streaked white and has a black tail, and lives in marshes rather than along forest streams. The barred female with a chestnut head is unmistakable in the region.
Habitat
Muddy margins of streams and pools in evergreen lowland forest and gallery forest, swampy spots with ferns and undergrowth, and densely overgrown edges of swamp forest. It forages for insects, worms and small snails in the leaf litter and mud at the water's edge.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
In the region only in north-western Zambia (the Mwinilunga district, along the headwaters of the Zambezi) and in northern Angola. Beyond the region it occurs across the rainforest belt of West and Central Africa, from Senegal to South Sudan, Uganda and western Kenya.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
At Mwinilunga, for example in the gallery forests along the Zambezi and the Sakeji, best found by listening for the hollow call series along forest streams in the early morning. Wait quietly beside an open, muddy stretch of bank; the bird sometimes steps briefly into view.
Conservation status
Not threatened and fairly common in the core of its range. At the southern edge of the range, in Zambia and Angola, it depends on a small area of gallery forest, which is declining locally through clearance and fire.
Scientific name
Sarothrura pulchra | (Gray, 1829)
Gray described the species in 1829 as Crex Pulchra; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Sarothrura was introduced in 1890 by Heine. Sarothrura comes from the Greek sarōtron, 'broom', and oura, 'tail' — for the short, brush-like tail of these small rails. pulchra is Latin for 'beautiful' — for the attractive white-spotted plumage. The specimen the first description was based on came from Sierra Leone.