The sickle-winged chat or sicklewing chat (''Emarginata sinuata'') is a small

passerine A passerine () is any bird of the order Passeriformes (; from Latin 'sparrow' and '-shaped') which includes more than half of all bird species. Sometimes known as perching birds, passerines generally have an anisodactyl arrangement of their ...

bird of the

Old World flycatcher The Old World flycatchers are a large family, the Muscicapidae, of small passerine birds restricted to the Old World (Europe, Africa and Asia), with the exception of several vagrants and two species, bluethroat (''Luscinia svecica'') and north ...

family Family (from ) is a Social group, group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or Affinity (law), affinity (by marriage or other relationship). It forms the basis for social order. Ideally, families offer predictabili ...

Muscicapidae endemic to southern

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent after Asia. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 20% of Earth's land area and 6% of its total surfac ...

. It is a common resident breeder in

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. Its Provinces of South Africa, nine provinces are bounded to the south by of coastline that stretches along the Atlantic O ...

and

Lesotho Lesotho, formally the Kingdom of Lesotho and formerly known as Basutoland, is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. Entirely surrounded by South Africa, it is the largest of only three sovereign enclave and exclave, enclaves in the world, t ...

, and is also found in southernmost areas of

Botswana Botswana, officially the Republic of Botswana, is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. Botswana is topographically flat, with approximately 70 percent of its territory part of the Kalahari Desert. It is bordered by South Africa to the sou ...

and

Namibia Namibia, officially the Republic of Namibia, is a country on the west coast of Southern Africa. Its borders include the Atlantic Ocean to the west, Angola and Zambia to the north, Botswana to the east and South Africa to the south; in the no ...

. Its habitat is

Karoo The Karoo ( ; from the Afrikaans borrowing of the South Khoekhoe Khoemana (also known as !Orakobab or Korana) word is a semidesert natural region of South Africa. No exact definition of what constitutes the Karoo is available, so its extent is ...

scrub, short grassland, and barren sandy or stony areas. In western coastal areas, it also occurs on agricultural land.

Taxonomy

The first formal description of the sickle-winged chat was by the Swedish zoologist

Carl Jakob Sundevall Carl Jakob Sundevall (22 October 1801 in Högestad – 2 February 1875) was a Sweden, Swedish zoologist. Sundevall studied at Lund University, where he received a Ph.D. in 1823. After traveling to East Asia, he studied medicine, graduating as a ...

in 1858 under the binomial name ''Luscinia sinuata''. The species was subsequently placed in the

genus Genus (; : genera ) is a taxonomic rank above species and below family (taxonomy), family as used in the biological classification of extant taxon, living and fossil organisms as well as Virus classification#ICTV classification, viruses. In bino ...

''Cercomela'' introduced by

Charles Lucien Bonaparte Charles Lucien Jules Laurent Bonaparte, 2nd Prince of Canino and Musignano (24 May 1803 – 29 July 1857) was a French naturalist and ornithology, ornithologist, and a nephew of Napoleon. Lucien and his wife had twelve children, including Cardinal ...

in 1856. It was moved to the current genus, ''

Emarginata ''Emarginata'' is a genus of birds in the Old World flycatcher family Muscicapidae that occur in southern Africa. The three species in the genus were previously placed in the genus ''Cercomela''. A molecular phylogenetic study published in 2010 ...

'', after

molecular phylogenetic Molecular phylogenetics () is the branch of phylogeny that analyzes genetic, hereditary molecular differences, predominantly in DNA sequences, to gain information on an organism's evolutionary relationships. From these analyses, it is possible to ...

studies published in 2010 and 2012 found that ''Cercomela'' was

polyphyletic A polyphyletic group is an assemblage that includes organisms with mixed evolutionary origin but does not include their most recent common ancestor. The term is often applied to groups that share similar features known as Homoplasy, homoplasies ...

. The specific epithet ''sinuata'' is the Latin for "curved". There are 3

subspecies In Taxonomy (biology), biological classification, subspecies (: subspecies) is a rank below species, used for populations that live in different areas and vary in size, shape, or other physical characteristics (Morphology (biology), morpholog ...

: * ''E. s. hypernephela'' — Lesotho * ''E. s. ensifera'' — southern Namibia, western and central South Africa * ''E. s. sinuata'' — southern South Africa

Description

The sickle-winged chat is around in length and weighs . Its upperparts are dark grey, but it has brown wings and a rufous patch behind the eye. The tail and rump are buff-pink, with an inverted wedge of black at the end of the tail. Its underparts are off-white, the short straight bill, legs and feet are black and the eye is brown. The sexes are similar, but the juvenile has buff tips to its feathers. The contrast between the dark upperparts and the much paler underparts distinguish this species from the more uniformly coloured familiar chat. It also has the pale salmon-buff on the rump extending only onto the base of the tail, whereas the familiar chat has a richer hue which almost reaches the tip of the tail. The sickle-winged chat has a ''chak-chak'' call and a warbled song.

Behaviour

In Natal, South Africa The sickle-winged chat builds a cup-shaped nest of straw and leaves on the ground, usually under a bush or shrub. It lays two to four green or blue eggs. This species is monogamous. The sickle-winged chat is usually seen singly or in pairs. It forages on the ground or at the base of trees for

insect Insects (from Latin ') are Hexapoda, hexapod invertebrates of the class (biology), class Insecta. They are the largest group within the arthropod phylum. Insects have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body (Insect morphology#Head, head, ...

s. In comparison with the familiar chat, it spends more time on the ground and runs more swiftly. It flicks its wings, but less frequently than the familiar chat.

Conservation status

This common species has a large range, with an estimated extent of 850,000 km². The population size is believed to be large, and the species is not believed to approach the thresholds for the population decline criterion of the IUCN Red List (i.e. declining more than 30% in ten years or three generations). For these reasons, the species is evaluated as Least Concern.

References

* Ian Sinclair, Phil Hockey and Warwick Tarboton, ''SASOL Birds of Southern Africa'' (Struik 2002)
Birds of Southern Africa

External links

* Sicklewinged chat
Species text in The Atlas of Southern African Birds

Xeno-canto: audio recordings of the sickle-winged chatSickle-winged chat
Structured guide to the species in southern Africa {{Taxonbar, from=Q27075690 sickle-winged chat Birds of Southern Africa sickle-winged chat