Swallow-tailed Bee-eater

Fierce-looking brown-and-white fish-eater. Note adult’s contrasting white belly and white tail with a broad black bar across the tip. Juvenile is paler overall, with a streaked brown breast and barred underwings. Smaller Lesser Fish-Eagle has a less contrasting tail pattern and typically a more jagged-edged white belly patch in adults; juveniles average paler below overall. Gray-headed forages around rivers, lakes, and swamplands. Vocal; often detected by its hoarse yelping screams.

A large nectar-eating bird with a decurved beak and a long graduated tail. Dull brown above, it is mostly pale below with a broad rusty breast band and crown and a yellow undertail. Pairs prefer to breed in areas of flowering Protea in escarpment mountains; when these become senescent, the sugarbirds move to lower altitudes, congregating on other flowers such as aloes. The species sings a characteristic scratchy, jumbled twittering and twanging. The larger Cape Sugarbird is similar, but has a much longer graduated tail, moustache-like stripes, and a harsher song, and lacks the rusty breast and crown.

Fairly common to locally common; found in a wide variety of semiopen habitats from town parks to scrubby Andean slopes. Large grayish pigeon with a distinct pale dappling (“spotting”) on wing coverts and grayish eyes. Birds in the Andes have a distinct white band on the wing that is striking in flight. In eastern lowlands compare with Picazuro Pigeon, which has amber eyes, a pink breast, and a white wing band.