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Tit Hylia | Pholidornis rushiae
Meeshylia | Hilia Estriada
At about 8 cm the Tit Hylia is one of the smallest birds in Africa: a tiny, short-tailed arboreal bird with a streaked head and breast, a yellow belly and bright orange legs. It lives in small groups high in the forest and builds a conspicuously large, round hanging nest. In the region it occurs only in northern Angola.
Voice
A thin, high, sharp tsip or tsee-tsee, often repeated as a contact call within the group, and a soft, rapid chipping. Often missed because of the high pitch and the height at which the birds feed.
Recording: Mike Nelson — CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
7.5–8 cm. Head, throat and breast pale buff to greyish brown with dense dark brown streaks; the mantle is olive-brown, the rump bright yellow. The lower breast and belly are yellow. The bill is short, pointed and dark; the legs are strikingly orange to flesh-coloured. The tail is very short, giving the bird a tit-like or penduline-tit-like silhouette. Juveniles are duller and less streaked. It moves quickly and restlessly through the canopy, often hanging from twigs and leaf stalks.
Confusion species
Green Crombec Sylvietta virens has a similar tailless silhouette but is unstreaked brownish olive with a pale throat. Little Green Sunbird Anthreptes seimundi is unstreaked olive-green, with a longer, slightly curved bill. Yellow-Bellied Eremomela Eremomela icteropygialis has an unstreaked grey head and breast and lives in savanna rather than forest. The combination of streaked breast, yellow rump and orange legs is diagnostic.
Habitat
Edges and clearings of moist lowland forest, gallery forest, secondary forest and well-wooded plantations, especially in tall trees with plenty of epiphytes and creepers. It usually forages at 5–15 m and higher in groups of up to seven birds, sometimes with mixed flocks. Food consists of very small insects, especially scale insects, and spiders. The nest is a round ball of plant fibres with a downward-hanging entrance spout, high in a tree; group members sometimes help build it.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
In the region confined to northern Angola: Cabinda and the forested areas of Uíge, Zaire and Cuanza Norte, with a few reports further east. Beyond the region in the forest belt of West and Central Africa, from Sierra Leone and Guinea to Uganda and eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, and on Bioko.
How and when to look
Because of its tiny size and life high in the canopy a seldom-observed species: search in Cabinda and the northern forests along edges and clearings where you can see into the crowns, and listen for the thin tsip of a foraging group. A hanging nest, with its conspicuous entrance spout, often gives away a regular site.
Conservation status
Not threatened; widespread but often overlooked. In Angola it depends on the remaining lowland forest, which is shrinking through logging and farming.
Scientific name
Pholidornis rushiae | (Cassin, 1855)
Cassin described the species in 1855 as Diceum Rushiae; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Pholidornis was introduced in 1857 by Hartlaub. Pholidornis comes from the Greek pholis (genitive pholidos), 'scale', and ornis, 'bird' — for the finely scaled or streaked pattern on the head and breast. rushiae honours Phoebe Ann Rush (née Ridgway, 1799–1857), wife of the American pioneer psychologist Dr James Rush. The specimen the first description was based on came from Mondah River, Gabon.