In 1980, we organized a Birds of the World course while I was in graduate school. The goal was to survey birds’ taxonomic orders and families and learn about their ecology, behaviors, and distribution. Glen Woolfenden, our major professor, had a moderately good skin collection at the University of South Florida, and to see more bird families, we took a weekend trip to the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. At one point, we covered the family Colliidae, the mousebirds. The family has only two genera and six species. It occurs across Africa south of the Sahara. Descriptions of their tails being more than twice the length of their bodies, their movement in groups, dashing through thick bushes like mice, and their direct flights caught my fascination.
For some reason, I thought their size was like the field mice we had on the farm in Pennsylvania, with bodies a few inches long and tails of similar length. I was shocked when I spotted my first one in Kenya. It was much bigger than I expected. Its body was four or five inches long, and the tail more than twice that. I remember taking a double take, thinking there was no way I had it that wrong, but I did.
On this trip to Uganda, I hoped to watch them more. These birds are known as folivorous, meaning they feed on fruits, leaves, and flowers. They are monogamous, and helpers, probably young from previous clutches, help raise the next brood. They often travel in small flocks, moving through the vegetation like amoebas.
We found Speckled Mousebirds several times during our ten-day trip, always in scrubby savannah habitat, often with one sitting high like in this photograph, keeping an eye out for predators while the others fed.
Speckled Mousebird
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What a wonderful, enticing article!
Thanks so much. I hope it has warmed up a little.