Piping Cisticola

Piping Cisticola
Outeniqua pass.
Conservation status
Least Concern (IUCN 3.1)
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Aves
Order:	Passeriformes
Family:	Cisticolidae
Genus:	Cisticola
Species:	C. fulvicapillus
Binomial name
Cisticola fulvicapillus (Vieillot, 1817)

The Piping Cisticola, Cisticola fulvicapillus, is a small passerine bird. In South Africa it is known as the Neddicky from the Afrikaans name for the species.

This cisticola is a resident breeder in much of Africa from Gabon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Tanzania south to the Cape.

The Piping Cisticola is a very common bird of open woodland, including savannah with trees and open plantations of exotic species. It avoids densely wooded habitats.

Description

In flight

The Piping Cisticola is a small, vocal, dull-coloured brown bird, 11 cm in length. Its tail is not as short as that of some other cisticola species. This bird has a reddish cap and a plain back. The underparts are buff, darker in tone on the breast. The brown bill is short and straight, and the feet and legs are pinkish-brown. The eye is light brown. The sexes are similar, but juvenile birds are yellower.

The southern form found in the western Cape Province has grey underparts and a grey-brown back. Although cisticolas can be very similar in plumage, this greyish subspecies is therefore quite distinctive.

The call of the Piping Cisticola is a monotonous, penetrating, repetitive weep weep weep. The alarm call is a loud clicking tictictictic, like a fingernail running across the teeth of a comb.

Behaviour

The Piping Cisticola builds a ball-shaped nest with a side entrance from dry grass, cobwebs and felted plant down. The nest is placed low in a thorny shrub, or in thick grass. In South Africa, this bird breeds mainly from September to March.

The Piping Cisticola It is usually seen in pairs or singly, flitting in a bush or the grass at the base of a tree as it forages for small insects.

Conservation status

This common species has a large range, with an estimated extent of 4,100,000 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) ISBN 1-86872-721-1