The southern tchagra (''Tchagra tchagra'') is a passerine bird found in dense scrub and coastal bush in southern and south-eastern South Africa and

Eswatini Eswatini ( ; ss, eSwatini ), officially the Kingdom of Eswatini and formerly named Swaziland ( ; officially renamed in 2018), is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. It is bordered by Mozambique to its northeast and South Africa to its no ...

. This species is a

bushshrike The bushshrikes are smallish passerine birds. They were formerly classed with the true shrikes in the family Laniidae, but are now considered sufficiently distinctive to be separated from that group as the family Malaconotidae, a name that allud ...

, a group closely related to the true

shrike Shrikes () are passerine birds of the family Laniidae. The family is composed of 34 species in four genera. The family name, and that of the largest genus, ''Lanius'', is derived from the Latin word for "butcher", and some shrikes are also know ...

s in the family Laniidae, and formerly included in that family.

Identification

The southern tchagra is 17–21 cm in length. It has a brown crown and black eye stripes separated by a broad white

supercilium The supercilium is a plumage feature found on the heads of some bird species. It is a stripe which runs from the base of the bird's beak above its eye, finishing somewhere towards the rear of the bird's head.Dunn and Alderfer (2006), p. 10 Also ...

. The underparts are pale grey and the upperparts pale brown. The folded wings are chestnut and the tail is black, tipped white. The longish bill is black. The sexes are similar, but young birds are duller and have a buff stripe through the eye. This species is similar to the

black-crowned tchagra The black-crowned tchagra (''Tchagra senegalus'') is a bushshrike. This family of passerine birds is closely related to the true shrikes in the family Laniidae, and was once included in that group. This species is found in the Arabian peninsula ...

, but that species is larger, and the adult, as its name implies, has a black rather than brown crown. An identification pitfall is that juvenile black-crowned tchagra has a brown crown. It can be separated from southern tchagra by its larger size, relatively shorter bill and paler underparts. There are three fairly similar subspecies of southern tchagra. Nominate ''T. t. tchagra'' of the Western Cape has the darkest underparts and longest bill. ''T. t. caffrariae'' has paler underparts and the shortest bill, and ''T. t. natalensis'' of eastern South Africa and Eswatini has the palest underparts and a reddish-brown crown. The male southern tchagra has a descending whistling song, ''ttttrtr te te te teuuu'' given in its display flight or from a perch. The female responds with a trilled ''tzerrrrrrrr''.

Behaviour

The cup nest is constructed of twigs and stems in a branch fork in a bush or scrub. Two, sometimes three

egg An egg is an organic vessel grown by an animal to carry a possibly fertilized egg cell (a zygote) and to incubate from it an embryo within the egg until the embryo has become an animal fetus that can survive on its own, at which point the a ...

s are laid. These are white, marked with grey and reddish-brown, and hatch after about 16 days, with another 14 days to fledging. This is a solitary territorial species, less conspicuously than true shrikes, especially when breeding. It forages on the ground for insects and other small prey.

References

*Sinclair, Hockey and Tarboton, ''SASOL Birds of Southern Africa'', * Tony Harris and Kim Franklin, ''Shrikes & Bush Shrikes'' (Christopher Helm, 2000)

External links

* Southern Tchagra
Species text in The Atlas of Southern African Birds

Range map and recordings of southern tchagra
on Xeno-canto {{Taxonbar, from=Q1316805 southern tchagra Birds of Southern Africa southern tchagra Taxa named by Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot