Colours of Wildlife: Lazy Cisticola
Created | Updated Aug 18, 2019
Lazy Cisticola
Willem is a wildlife artist based in South Africa. He says "My aim is simply to express the beauty and wonder that is in Nature, and to heighten people's appreciation of plants, animals and the wilderness. Not everything I paint is African! Though I've never been there, I'm also fascinated by Asia and I've done paintings of Asian rhinos and birds as well. I may in future do some of European, Australian and American species too. I'm fascinated by wild things from all over the world! I mainly paint in watercolours. . . but actually many media including 'digital' paintings with the computer!"
Today I bring you an unfortunately-named little bird, a Lazy Cisticola, Cisticola aberrans. Why lazy? I couldn't yet find any satisfactory answer. It might be because of its rather slow, soft 'zeet zeet' call, which is not as vigorous as the chirping calls of most other cisticolas. The bird itself is an active little thing, flitting about, cocking its tail, and scurrying amidst grass and over rocks. Being very nondescript in colour and appearance, it's still a little critter I love a lot. Its scientific name means 'aberrant cisticola', though it is not really that deviant in appearance or behaviour.
The Rock-Rose Dwellers
The name 'Cisticola' means, more or less, 'dweller amidst the rock roses'. Cisticolas often occur in scrubby, weedy habitats, but there are species that inhabit semi-deserts, grasslands, savannahs, woodlands, reeds and swamps, and many other habitats. They're absent from heavy forests, though. There are about fifty species known, and all but two occur on the continent of Africa. In the past, they were classified in the warbler family, the Sylviidae, but this family has now been massively broken up. It turns out that the 'warblers' are mainly similar to each other in appearance due to having similar ways of life in similar environments, but genetically, many of them are actually not closely related to each other. Cisticolas now reside in their own family, the Cisticolidae, along with a bunch of other small, warbler-like birds. It seems that they are most closely related to the swallows and martins, to the Bulbuls, and to the White-eyes. The vast majority of species in the family live in Africa, where they likely evolved. A very interesting group among them is the so-called 'tailorbirds'. These include a few actual cisticola species, but most of them belong to the genus Orthotomus, the only large genus of the family to occur in Asia rather than Africa. These birds stitch tree or shrub leaves together to make a base for their nests. They use their sharp bills to poke holes in the edges of the leaves, and then bind adjacent leaves together by threading spiderwebs or plant fibers through these holes and knotting or teasing out the ends so they can't slip out. They fashion the stitched-together leaves into a little cup, which they then line with soft, downy material to make a comfy nest.
In Africa, cisticolas pose some of the greatest identification challenges. They almost all look the same: small, brownish or greyish, with or without darker streaks on their backs, wings and tails. Not only that, but most species have three different plumages: immature, summer, and winter. The differences between these plumages may be subtle, but often not as subtle as the general differences between completely different species. With about fifty species on the continent, most of them widespread, and many places having several species occurring together or very close to each other, there's a lot of scope for misidentifications. But a little bit of knowledge helps. First of all, there are subtle differences in the habitat preferences of most species. Some are extremely picky about the kind of place they'd want to live in. Next, they don't all behave the same. Some have their own, characteristic little habits or mannerisms. Mostly, the way to distinguish between them is by their calls. In the old days, there was a series of audio cassettes with the calls of birds, and I bought these to learn them; today, there are apps you can get for your cell phone that feature the calls of these and other birds. Cisticola calls are amazingly varied; it is as if they consciously compensate for their drab plumage by elaborating their voices as much as they can. They also have characteristic behaviours or displays as they call: from sitting on a tree repeating the same note almost the whole day long in the Neddicky, through rich, complex warbling and trilling songs given while perched on a reed by many of the wetland-dwellers, to the short-tailed cisticolas with display flights so high up that sometimes you can't see them from the ground. Some of them also have modified wing feathers so that they can produce a sharp, audible snapping or knocking sound as they beat their wings, to augment their voices. We call those ones 'klopkloppies' in Afrikaans.
So how do you know if you have a lazy cisticola before you? First there's its general appearance: quite small, dull brownish – except for a wash of richer reddish brown on the top of its head; tail fairly long, and often cocked high over its back. (This appearance is similar to a Tawnyfanked Prinia, which is a smaller, more delicate bird, overall lighter in colour, with a proportionally longer, narrower tail and a different call.) Next, where you see it: in scrubby or grassy environment, often in an area with lots of rocks and boulders, broken land, hillsides, valley bottoms or gulleys, or weedy edges of forests. Last, its demeanour and behaviour: not particularly shy or furtive, but inquisitive, often perching on a bush or tall grass stem to get a look at you; in motion mostly close to ground level, often scurrying or running quickly on the ground over rocks or between tufts of grass. Finally, its call: in South Africa, its most distinctive call is a rather slow, mournful, bleating, 'zeet-zeet'. (In Zimbabwe it gives a quite different, ringing 'spink' call, and these birds may actually be a different species.) You can often call a male lazy cisticola closer by 'spishing', a bird-watcher's term for making 'spshhhh-spshhhh' or 'kssss-kssss' sounds, which many small birds will come to investigate.
An interesting attribute of lazy cisticolas is their call variations. The 'zeet-zeet' call described above is the typical one in South Africa, but there are other calls given as well, and there is not only differences between the calls of males, females and juveniles, but there are also regional dialects. I'm not yet acquainted with these, but I'll keep my ears out for them when going birding further from home.
Like other cisticolas, lazies are insect eaters, mostly caterpillars and grasshoppers. They find these on the ground or in vegetation. They feed their chicks largely on small grasshoppers, removing the kicking legs first. They nest in tufts of grass or in low bushes. The nest is mostly of grass, lined with plant down such as the fluffy seeds of many savannah species. The male is active in chasing other cisticolas away from the nest. The chicks hatch naked, and like other cisticolas have characteristic spots on their tongues. Their droppings are enclosed in membranes to form a little 'bag' that the parents pick up in their bills and then carry off to drop well away from the nest. After fledging, the chicks remain with their parents for another month or so, being taught how to find food and how to be proper lazy cisticolas.
Lazy cisticolas occur in south-Eastern Africa: the very southernmost parts of Tanzania, and from there into Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, the far-eastern corner of Botswana, and eastern South Africa, as far south as the Eastern Cape Province. Though nowhere very common, they are not at present endangered. Locally they are actually vanishing from some areas because of commercial afforestation which reduces the amount of open countryside available to them.
