Chocolate Boobook

A large, robust, ungainly cuckoo with rufous wings and a long, broad tail. The underparts and back are streaked, and it has a distinctive white eyebrow. The rump and upper tail coverts are barred, unlike other coucals. It often moves clumsily, preferring to clamber about in rank vegetation or walk on the ground foraging for insects or small vertebrates. Its flight is labored and heavy. This species uses a wide variety of habitats with a thick understory, including savanna, woodland, forest edge, and wetlands. The song is a descending bubbling series, “bu-bu-bu bu bu bu bu”, that falls and then rises in pitch.

Medium-sized warbler with prominent pale “spectacles.” Extent of gray crown coloration is geographically variable; Himalayan birds average the darkest and Chinese birds the palest. Himalayan and Vietnamese birds’ dark gray crowns may recall Gray-cheeked Warbler, but both forms of White-spectacled Warbler have a much more contrasting crown pattern and bright yellow throats. White-spectacled’s eye-ring is broken at the top instead of at the back as it is in Golden-spectacled and Gray-crowned Warblers. Forages at lower levels of the forest, often making sallies after mobile prey. Breeds at medium altitudes in broadleaf hill and montane forest, with Chinese and Himalayan birds moving to lower altitudes in the non-breeding season. Song is distinctly broken and hesitant, slowly picking up as it progresses and ending with a variable trill; contains more trilling than Gray-cheeked Warbler’s song. Lower in pitch and more faltering, less accelerating, than the songs of Gray-crowned and Martens’s Warblers. Presence of any trilling components at all distinguishes this species from Bianchi’s Warbler. 

A medium-sized typical ‘double-collared’ sunbird with a long bill. Male has a very broad red breast band, bluish-violet rump patch, and a dusky belly. Female is dull gray-brown. Pairs and singles are common but extremely local in highland forests and thicket edges, restricted to distinct regions that perhaps represent three separate species: the Angolan scarp; Nyika Plateau of Malawi; and the Eastern Arc, Tanzania. Larger, with a broader red breast band on the male, than either Eastern Miombo or Forest Double-collared sunbirds; the latter also has an olive (not dusky) belly. Has a typical jumbled sunbird song.