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Spotted Sandgrouse | Pterocles senegallus
Sahelzandhoen | Ganga moteada
The palest sandgrouse in this guide and the largest of the three desert species: a long-bodied, sand-coloured bird with an orange face and two fine tail streamers. On bare gravel plains it is next to invisible, and most sightings begin as sound — a flock coming in to water, low and fast, with a soft bubbling call that carries right across the flat.
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Voice
The flight call is a musical, bubbling quee-too quee-too, sometimes written witt-oo witt-oo: two syllables, the second lower, with a whistled undertone. It is markedly softer and rounder than anything the Iberian sandgrouse produce. Flocks call almost continuously on the way to water, and over open ground the sound carries several hundred metres. Birds flushed at close range give a shorter, harder kwit.
Recording: Jerome Fischer — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
Bigger and slimmer than the other two desert sandgrouse, with elongated central tail feathers — shorter than those of Pin-Tailed Sandgrouse, but plain to see both perched and in flight. The male is almost unmarked sandy: grey crown and nape, orange-yellow face and throat, plain pinkish-grey breast with no band at all, and a narrow dark stripe running down the centre of the belly to the vent. The female is finely spotted black over head, breast and mantle, which is where the English name comes from, and shows the same dark belly stripe. In flight the primaries look strikingly pale with a dark trailing edge, and the underwing coverts are sandy rather than white. Legs short and feathered, bill small and blue-grey.
Confusion species
At a drinking pool it often stands beside Crowned Sandgrouse, and that is the comparison worth learning. This bird is larger and longer-bodied, carries two fine tail streamers and has a plain orange face; the Crowned Sandgrouse has a short pointed tail with no streamers, and its male wears a black band running from the forehead between the eyes down to the chin. Then look underneath: a narrow dark stripe runs down the middle of the belly here, while the Crowned Sandgrouse is unmarked below. Lichtenstein's Sandgrouse presents no problem at all — much smaller, shorter-tailed, and closely barred all over. Against the two Iberian species the underwing is the thing to fix on: sandy here, so the bird reads as evenly pale from below, rather than white with a hard dark border. And the call always settles it: a soft two-syllable bubbling, neither a dry rattle nor a low rolling call.
Habitat
Flat desert with little relief: sand and gravel plains, the margins of dune fields, wide expanses of hamada with scattered tussocks, and broad dry wadi beds. Of the three desert sandgrouse this is the one that tolerates the loosest sand, and it is often found exactly where erg meets reg. Food is seeds picked from the ground while walking, and flocks also feed on stubble and field edges around the oases and in the farmland of the Negev. Water sets the shape of the day: one to two hours after sunrise the flocks arrive at a pool, a cattle trough or a well, drink quickly and leave. The male soaks his belly feathers there; that plumage holds water, and he flies it back to the chicks, which drink it straight from the feathers.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
Two centres within the area of the maps. In the southern Levant it is resident in the Negev and the Arava, commonest in the south. In north-west Africa it breeds in the pre-Sahara south of the High Atlas and Anti-Atlas: the Tafilalt around Rissani and Merzouga, the plains near Zagora, and the middle Draa. Further east and south, beyond the map, the range runs right across the Sahara and Arabia across the Iranian Plateau to the north-west of the Indian subcontinent. It is not a bird to look for in Europe; only scattered individuals have ever crossed the Mediterranean.
- Resident
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Go to the water and wait. In the Arava and the Negev, and at the wells and livestock troughs around Merzouga and Rissani, flocks arrive between one and two hours after sunrise — later than most desert birds, so there is no need to rush. Sit low with the sun behind you and listen: the bubbling quee-too almost always arrives before the birds do. Searching the open plain is rarely productive; when something is picked up it is usually no more than an orange head above a tussock. A scope from a fixed vantage beats driving around.
Conservation status
Not globally threatened — the species occupies an enormous desert belt from the Atlantic coast of the Sahara to the Indian subcontinent — but along the northern edge of that belt the decline is steep. In the Negev the population has fallen steeply since the 1980s, and the species has all but vanished from the Be'er Sheva valley and the north-western Negev. The reasons given are the loss of clean drinking water, the spread of arable land and greenhouses, disturbance from military training and grazing, and increased nest predation by foxes and jackals subsidised by human waste. No targeted conservation measures have been taken there so far.
Scientific name
Pterocles senegallus | (Linnaeus, 1771)
Linnaeus described the species in 1771 as Tetrao senegallus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Pterocles was introduced in 1815 by Temminck. Pterocles is Greek, from pteron 'wing' and -klēs 'notable, splendid'. senegallus is Latin for 'of Senegal', after the country the first described birds came from. The specimen the first description was based on came from Algeria.