Namaqua Warbler

Slim, long-tailed, pretty waxbill. The upperparts are pale brown and the underparts and tail blue. Males have a distinctive magenta mark on the cheek. Generally common in a wide variety of open habitat, including dry thornscrub, all types of savanna, villages, and cultivation. Usually in pairs or small flocks. The common call is a high-pitched “tsee-tsee.” In the area of overlap, females are very difficult to separate from Southern Cordonbleu. They tend to show more extensive brown on the cheek, but are most safely identified by association with red-cheeked males.

A highly variable finch with three distinct forms in the process of diversifying. The massive large-billed form is known as “Dunn’s Finch”; the two smaller forms with petite bills are a drab olive lowland form (Lowland Finch) and a bright yellow highland form (Highland Finch). Females of all forms are smaller, duller, and more streaked than males. Endemic to Inaccessible Island, where it is the only finch. Lowland form prefers grassy coast and cliffs, highland form prefers the plateau, and Dunn’s form prefers taller fruit-bearing woodland. In all forms, male sings a 3-note “whit-it-teeu” and the female whistles; Dunn’s form sounds deeper and slower than the others.

This red-eyed masked-weaver has a plain olive-green back and pink-brown legs. The breeding male has a black face mask, with the black band on the forehead above the bill varying from broad in the south to narrow farther north. Female and juvenile are dull and inseparable from other masked-weavers. Pairs and colonies are localized residents of reedbeds, wetlands and adjacent woodland, in a narrow global range between northeastern Zambia and southeastern DRC. The breeding males of Katanga and Southern masked-weavers are very similar, but the former are smaller, have some saffron around the masks, and have darker green backs and rumps; breeding male Tanganyika and Lake Lufira Masked-Weavers have more burnt-orange around the face and underparts, and ranges do not overlap.